Career links: teams and business

Disclaimer: Not advice, consult a professional!

Following on a previously posted collection of links, here is another collection of resources focused on more organization-oriented topics. These are not exhaustive, and indeed some of these resources likely contradict each other outright. As in previous post, the reader is encouraged to take what they find suitable and leave the rest.

Context

“Some of us will do our jobs well and some will not, but we will all be judged on one thing: the result.” -Vince Lombardi

Most likely, a good deal of your professional work will occur in the context of collaboration with other individuals acting in some coordinated way to achieve higher-level goals. While your individual efforts will make a crucial contribution to the outcome, the effectiveness of how you and others work together will also be hugely important. Given this, it is worth giving some dedicated thought to the structure and dynamics of teams, organizations (especially businesses), and management.

WHAT: product development

Software engineering often supports the development of products or services that solve (either internal or external) customer problems. Questions about what exactly the team should build are important, and it is useful to acquire some familiarity with frameworks and tools people use to grapple with them:

• The Lean Product Playbook - Dan Olsen
• What Customers Want - Anthony Ulwick

HOW: teams, management, and organizations

How do people, teams, and organizations align and coordinate their efforts most effectively? Tough question, but here are some books about it.

Not necessarily software-specific:

• High Output Management - Andrew Grove
• High Growth Handbook - Elad Gil
• Principles - Ray Dalio

At least kind of software-specific:

• The Principles of Product Development Flow - Donald Reinertsen
• Manager’s Path - Camille Fournier
• An Elegant Puzzle - Will Larson
• Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps - Nicole Forsgren, PhD, Jez Humble, and Gene Kim

WHY: business structure and strategy

Zooming even further out than “What/Product” questions, we can consider why the business even exists, how it is organized, and why it does what it does:

• The Nature of the Firm - Ronald Coase
• 7 Powers - Hamilton Helmer
• Understanding Michael Porter - Joan Magretta

WILD CARD: Harrison Metal

Harrison Metal is an interesting organization, see their website for details. Among other things, they offer a library of free short instructional videos on a (very) wide range of startup and business topics and tactics. A few in particular that I have often forwarded to people are below:

• Thank you, Barbara Minto
• Sense-Making Cartoons
• Drake’s Equation
• Thank you, Robert McKee

Optional: tangentially relevant historical nonfiction

It can also be illuminating to take a deeper dive on some specific historical (up to and including very recent history) examples of teams, organizations, and projects.

• The Idea Factory - Jon Gertner
• The Making of the Atomic Bomb - Richard Rhodes
• Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software - Nadia Eghbal

Written on September 9th, 2021 by David M. Andrzejewski