Your are the builder not the architect. Thoughts on the craft of leadership
The architecture is clear, we need builders who can actually bring it to life, adapt, and maintain it.
Hundreds of books have been written in the past decade on the perfect modern software product development organization. If you have read only a few of them or visited a conference or two in the past year you know everything you need to know on what makes an organization excel.
The summary goes vaguely like this: Things are changing fast (tech, competition, legislation you name it) therefore you need an organization that can adapt quickly over and over again. For that, you need self-organized, autonomous teams, and a clear bold objective that keeps them aligned, and then you need to iterate towards it in small increments whilst being close to your customer and being able to react to new insights on the spot.
Many different frameworks have been created to describe the above in more detail agile, lean, Scrum, SAFE, flight level, OKRs, team topologies, blue ocean strategy, insert newest Marty Cagan to name a few but strongly simplified it comes down to those couple of sentences.
These sentences describe what I call the architecture and we do not need more of that we have enough of it for now.
What we need is builders who know how to bring this modern architecture to life.
It is about actually doing it. About mixing the mortar, putting brick on brick, making sure the wall are level, getting the place watertight, and fitting it out. And then maintaining it against wear and tear, climate change, and rogue inhabitants.
It is about how to do all the magical things the architects have put out there. It is about the craft of leading in these types of organizations. About the practical day-to-day. Not about how it should be like but how to get there and how to keep it going every single day.
It is about dancing the line between giving enough guidance and opening up the space for self-organized teams to thrive and about knowing how to course correct when you have overstepped into either directions. It is about actually truly creating alignment and communicating it consistently through a growing organization so that when the direction changes every single person involved knows.
It is about truly empowering people, and helping them if they do not know how to yet. It is about handling every single escalation in a way so that the next one won't come to you but so that a little part of the org has learned to handle it themselves.
It is about complete transparency so that no valuable information falls through the cracks and the experts in the teams can make the right decisions.
It is about consistently reslicing and rearranging to reduce complexity and dependencies and managing those that cannot be reduced.
It is an ongoing battle against the chaos that wants to creep in because things are changing all the time and humans have bad days.
It is an uphill battle but it is a craft to be honed and pure joy when you realize that you have mastered yet another aspect of the craft giving yourself one more option to bring the architecture alive and therefore create the space people actually want to work in and great products can thrive.
My work over the past two decades has been about exactly that the hands-on work of creating great product organizations and I love it - I am not an architect, and I will not add to the canon of architectural blueprints but if you need a couple of additional pages in your how to builders guide you have come to the right place.
