Zef+

on management, people, plus more

Recent posts

Tick Tock, We’re Building a Clock

I was an admirer or Steve Jobs. The amount of creativity that he inspired made a huge difference to modern-day technology. To me, he was the ultimate example of a charismatic leader. However, I fear he was better at telling time than that he was at clock building. And as

Punch Holes and Dynamic Islands

When I moved into a leadership role at my first start-up, I was recommended to read “Leadership is an Art” by Max Depree. One of the fist sentences in this book always stuck with me: The first responsibility of a leader is to define reality. Huh? What do you mean

Once and For All

And... we’re back to our exciting series on how to structure engineering organizations! Our ultimate goal? To finally answer your kid’s FAQ: “Mommy, daddy, where do platform teams come from?” In episodes I and II we covered two fundamentalist approaches of how we could structure an engineering organization:

Guess the Org Chart

I have to apologize to you all. I had not anticipated the amount of sleepless nights and marital problems I would cause to many of you by leaving you hanging with a cliffhanger like that, last week. A few cleaned up responses: WHAT HAPPENS WHEN WE GO VERTICAL!? I NEED

Going Horizontal

“But we have a QA team, right. Why aren’t they writing the end-to-end tests for this?” “We have a mobile team, right? Why don’t they build the mobile version of this?” “We have a performance team, right. Why don’t they write the load tests for this?” Excellent

Rambo vs. Campbell

The bad guys are winning. People have lost all hope. Who could possibly still save the day? Some noise comes from the bushes. All of a sudden, an excessively muscular dude with a head band jumps out from the branches. He’s carrying a large machine gun, wearing belts of

Programmable Applications

To me, the most exciting software is the type that sparks creative use cases. Software that ends up being used in ways that its developers never anticipated. This tends to happen primarily with software that has managed to transform itself into a platform. Rather than pretending to be able to

No More War

> Daddy, will there ever be a third world war? It’s just over two months ago that one my sons (five years old) asked me this question during breakfast. There was nothing in particular that triggered asking it at the time. There were some developments around Ukraine, but nothing that

Great Parenting!

“Zef, you keep talking about all these amazing management concepts. You are an inspiration to all. However, what I really want to know is how you apply your enlightened ideas to being a parent!” — Nobody, Ever Dear mister or miss “Ever” — if this is in fact your real name. I’

Feetback

Decision: from tomorrow you are going to make all the meetings in your organization 100% optional. Truly optional — no (more) repercussions for people not showing up. What’s going to happen now? In the perfect organization, nothing happens at all. People are invited to meetings where they feel they can