Sublime

heads down coding and building product. At fifteen to twenty people, you need to start the process of delegating your engineering responsibilities. The only way you’re going to achieve this is to absolutely trust your engineering team. Hire the best chief technology officer you can find and the best engineers you can find. At first, review all thei

In 1963, IBM discovered that about 80 percent of a computer’s time is spent executing about 20 percent of the operating code. The company immediately rewrote its operating software to make the most-used 20 percent very accessible and user friendly, thus making IBM computers more efficient and faster than competitors’ machines for the majority of ap

Don and Richard endured this build ordeal along with me, and during lunch and coffee breaks we commiserated with each other about how bored we were. We couldn’t fob this work off on junior programmers or interns either. Apple didn’t work like that. Secrecy was one reason, but, more important, Apple didn’t separate research and development from soft

What Kenoros proposed to teach the 18 teams was a technique called Last Minute Implementation, and it scared the hell out of Tompkins. The scheme involved deferring coding as long as possible, spending the middle 40% or more of the project doing an elaborate, exaggeratedly detailed low-level design, one that would have perfect one-to-one mappings t

In effectively run organizations, the functional leader is responsible for “who” and “how”—providing trained people who are competent in their profession to be used in sequentialized flows. The flow owner (e.g., project leader, program leader, value stream leader) is responsible for the “what” and “when” of how those people are deployed to achieve

The scientists could move from one project to another, which meant, member Chuck Thacker recalled, the best projects attracted the best people and “as a result, quality work flourished, less interesting work tended to wither.”