Sublime

Top-down leadership tries to promote uniformity through the commonality of policies, procedures, routines, and regulations. When everyone adheres to the same standards,¶¶ and those standards are imposed and monitored by a central authority, there’s limited discretion to act locally. In certain situations, this is done in order to minimize variance

No more planning hell and enormous dependency matrices. You need a new feature? Find a suitable team.4 The team won’t have exactly the skills required, so they get to practice their meta-skill of learning.

When cognitive load isn’t considered, teams are spread thin trying to cover an excessive amount of responsibilities and domains. Such a team lacks bandwidth to pursue mastery of their trade and struggles with the costs of switching contexts.

First, most of the customers I meet think they have a technology adoption problem, when in reality they have an org-chart problem. The most successful orgs are made up of many small independent business teams communicating via clear APIs. If that’s your org chart, you will inevitably build a microservices architecture, a trick known as the Reverse

As organizations grow, we often find common needs and the increased importance of shared services.

If one believes, as I have argued at many places in this book, that creativity comes from individuals and not from structures or processes, then a central question facing the software manager is how to design structure and process so as to enhance, rather than inhibit, creativity and initiative. Fortunately, this problem is not peculiar to software