Zef+

on management, people, plus more

Recent posts

The Debossification of Management

“If you treat me like a boss, we will struggle. If you treat my like a colleague, we can do great things together.” Boy, do I wish I was quoting myself here, but I’m not. This is a quote attributed to somebody in my team who said it — so

No More Bad Ideas

I get my best ideas while taking showers or taking walks. If you feel you don’t get enough great ideas, start taking showers. People around you will appreciate it for other reasons as well. And take walks too. Exercise you know. However, contrary to what you may have assumed

Mirror, mirror

Some time ago I wrote about the challenge to turn punch holes into dynamic islands. A fun subset of this problem space is to frame tasks that may appear as chores as life altering experiences. At some point I’m sure I’ll do a world tour asking audiences to

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