I know I have trust issues. I don’t need the blockchain crowd telling me.
Trusting is scary. We’ve all been burned at some point. But we can also look back and see trusting someone helped us develop, personally and professionally. None of us could be who we are if we had not learned this critical skill. Knowing where and how to trust is critical to growth, to life. It’s not even just humans - we can see this in our pets, our livestock.
A cynic might say that trust limits us. That if we only had less, we could do and be more. I’m not exactly known for looking on the bright side, but even I know this is wrong. Trust is the infrastructure for our experiences. Removing it flattens everything, not just limiting what you can do but limiting why you would do it.
Our problem is too little trust, not too much.
We know the stereotype of someone who does not trust. Someone outside of society. We know a person who cannot trust is broken in some way, missing something critical, in need of healing. Many of us also know the allure of not needing to trust, or be trusted. “Ah, to be independent, to owe nothing to anyone…”
This is the dream of remembered childhood. It was always a lie. We were failing to notice the work being done in our name, for us. It was a joyous lie, made more pleasant with the golden tinge of nostalgia. Grown, we miss the lie, we reach for it.
But deep down, we know: More than anything else, life is about trust.
Great companies have been built on this truth. eBay could only exist by creating trust between unknown parties.
Some look at this and see failure. “If only eBay had not needed trust…”
One of the Blockchain’s great claims is enabling commerce between people who don’t trust each other. Never mind that of course you still have to trust something - the code, the packaging of what you’re buying, the exchange, etc. You might scoff and say these are a given, but none of those things can be trusted in the current world of the blockchain. Never mind that commerce has always been done between people with little or no trust. That’s not what matters.
It is philosophical, psychological: Given the recognition that life is enriched by trust, and more riches require more trust, what do you do? Find a way to add trust to your life, or look for a way to get riches without it?
I can’t say the blockchain people are wrong. Maybe they really do need some kind of trustless commerce. I don’t know them. Well, other than the drug dealers. I know why they want this.
But in my life, for my problems? More trust is the answer, not less.
Ironically, the blockchain can actually help with that. Without changing a thing. Its boosters are right about its utility, they’re just wrong about why it works.
I don’t like to trust people with my data. People talk about wanting to own their data, being able to share bits with Facebook but not the whole thing. It’s a nice, if naive1, idea, but that’s not what I mean.
I don’t trust you to touch it. You’ll muck it up.
Heck, I don’t even trust myself. Actually, I was never given that choice. My apps don’t trust me with my own data. They keep it hidden away somewhere, behind an API, in proprietary formats.
Their distrust is reasonable. I don’t know how the app works. The data model is hidden, the storage internal. Most importantly, they can’t tell if I mess with it, and they can’t fix what I break.
Things were in some ways better in the age of documents, but now our data is all hidden. We ask them to give us access, and they sometimes comply with simplistic APIs. But they do not trust us.
What if they did? What if I were allowed access to my own data? What if I could share it with you, my close friend, because I trust you with it?
I mean, not entirely trust. I’m not stupid. We’re not that close.
With the right tools, I could see what you did, understand it, ensure it all makes sense. You could change it, query it, hand it back to me, and I could validate the whole thing. Get the best out of your work, but keep safety lines in place.
Again, a cynic would say call this an example of eliminating trust. But is it?
Is the key to this new interaction really that I don’t trust you?
No. I don’t want just anyone to have my data. It’s for you. My close friend. Who I already trust. Mostly.
This change does not entice me to share with psychopaths, strangers, or, god forbid, the people I went to high school with. It provides just enough of a bridge that I’m willing to give you, my good friend, who I just met on the internet, rights that I’d otherwise hold back.
Of course I know this is not what blockchain people mean when they talk about trust. Meh. I’m not interested in making capitalism even less moral, less human. I don’t even want to hang out with the people who do. But I am interested in making data more useful. And I’m especially interested in connecting with other people.
And this certainly does that.
Now my applications can expose their insides. They can be slugs instead of snails.2 I can use the apps I love, but my tools can fill their gaps. I can script my way around their missing APIs and limited reporting. Heck, I don’t need their interfaces at all. Just because they’re provided doesn’t make them good, and I can get there faster using the tools I already know.
I can pick the best app, without committing to a long-term relationship. I can give you my data, take advantage of what you offer, and if I want to change later, I don’t lose everything.
There’s a great example out there: Github. If they went away tomorrow, I would lose almost no data I care about. They host, but do not control, my most important data: my source code. I get some utility out of they’re hosting it, but they don’t get special rights.3
Github actually created a new kind of trust relationship: Because its users can trust the data store, they began to trust strangers to contribute code. If I were using Subversion, I would have to give you all or no access; in Git, I can give you qualified access. Github calls these ‘pull requests’. “Yes, you can contribute code, but I get to read it first.” That enables a flowering of trust, potentially leading to a deep relationship. That path to complete trust is much narrower, much harder without this infrastructure of gradual trust.
You can choose whether to see this as more or less trust. You can’t argue with the new bonds created, the new groups formed, all through the help of tooling. Almost like how commerce starts with low-trust exchanges of money and can lead to deep and meaningful relationships.
What would a world look like if all of my applications had just as much, or as little, ownership of my data as Github does?
Of course, the apps won’t like it much. Their trusting me with my data also gives me power over it, where today I have none.
With enough usage, our expectations start to change. Given two otherwise equivalent accounting apps, wouldn’t you pick the one that trusted you? That gave you equal access to your data, simplifying automation and reporting?
Facebook does not have all of your data because you provided a massive dump at once; they’ve painstakingly collected it over the years, bit by bit. You can be sure they’ll store every little piece you selectively reveal to them. ↩
Honestly I don’t know if slugs are more useful, but they’re certainly more vulnerable. And I could not think of a better analogy. ↩
There is some data that only they have. This is a limitation in git, more than the plan of GitHub. E.g., my follower list is not in my repo, which is probably good, but it’s not anywhere else I can access, which is probably bad. ↩
Modern capitalism raises the flag of the free market while pitting centrally planned organizations against each other
It’s quite a journey from being born on a commune to raising more than $87m in funding at a software company. This journey forced me to wrestle with existential questions about my true beliefs, and how they intersected my life as an entrepreneur. One’s work is rarely a pure reflection of ideology, but companies need a clear and authentic strategy, which requires a tight alignment between company operations and the founder’s philosophy. I have discovered more about those differences between what I believe and the best ways to grow a corporation while studying economics - that is, how money is made and exchanged - than any other area.
A worldwide conflict between communism and capitalism defined the latter half of the twentieth century. The United States’ ideological battle was the central drama of my childhood, and it was with a combination of glee, pride, and “told you so!” that my fellow Americans watched the wall fall in Berlin, and the USSR dissolve shortly thereafter. I expect few would deny that the US is the standard bearer for capitalism.
Yet, there’s a flaw at the heart of this claim. While the United States operates as a free market economy, the key agent within modern capitalism - the corporation - works more like an authoritarian state. Given how much of our world is built around corporations, this truth and its impacts are critical.
I grew up apart from America’s passion for capitalism. In the era of Reagan, I was living on a commune. My parents did not earn money for their labor, and we didn’t have personal property. My family left the Farm when I was 8, and as I matured, my ideological roots were in conflict with the US’s nonstop pro-capitalism message. As I joined the workforce and eventually started my own company, I found myself attached to neither the communal roots of my childhood nor the Wolf of Wall Street world I moved into. I grew slowly in convictions, as I encountered problems in the course of scaling a company.
The first real conflict came when it was time to hire managers. I founded a company primarily because I did not thrive as someone else’s employee, so what led me to think others would? More importantly, anyone who has ever operated at the front line is aware of the severe costs imposed by the separation between the people who do the work and the people who make the decisions in hierarchies. Hiring managers was just going to make the company do worse, not better, right? Right?
I expect three of you are gleefully shouting, “Yay, holacracy!” right now, while the rest are confused and either offended or think I’m an idiot. I did consider a manager-less world, but a little research provided only examples of disaster, because the only available options just replace an explicit power structure with an implicit one. In other words, it’s still hierarchical with the founder on top, but now decision making is opaque and the system is easy to exploit because of the lack of controls (which looks surprisingly like the cult/commune I grew up in).
Those who are confused or offended by the idea that managers make performance worse would be informed by a deep dip in economics. One of the core principles of the free market is that central planning committees can never be as efficient or as effective as the people doing the work. By definition a free market economy lacks a decision-making hierarchy; the ‘free’ means every agent (individual or corporation) can decide for themselves, without needing permission from a manager above.
While there are many aspects of modern American capitalism I reject, this one I wholeheartedly support1. The downsides of a strong central executive were taught to me early.
Like many other communes, the one I grew up on routinely failed to feed its people - my parents speak with horror of the ‘wheat berry winter’, when we lived on little else. While his people were short on food, the founder of the Farm was off touring Europe as the 3rd drummer in a band, “bringing our message to the world”.
Thankfully none of us starved to death, but the failing was similar to what most communist countries experienced: The central organization could not feed everyone. For years, I assumed this was just incompetence, whether at the scale of the Farm or China. The truth was far more structural. Millions starved during the Great Leap Forward because the central organization was trying something impossible: Managing the productive output of an entire country. The Planet Money podcast tells a great story of how this central planning was walked back in China, but the general point here is that these communist countries did not just nationalize the means of production, they tried to centrally control all of it from within a small group.2
When people talk about communist countries not being a free market, this is what they mean: They tell the farms what crops to produce and in what quantity, rather than letting them decide for themselves. China even went so far as to dictate what hours a farmer should start and stop working, and then directed managers to ring a bell for transition times to control every little group of farmers. Anyone who’s ever had to punch a clock into a rigid, dysfunctional hierarchy is likely getting painful flashbacks about now.
It should be immediately obvious why this fails miserably: The distance between the central planning committee and the farmer is so great that good decisions are nearly impossible. It’s nearly impossible for critical feedback to make it from the edge, where the farmers are working, to the central planning committee in time to affect decisions, and then for those decisions to make it back to the edge in time to be useful. The podcast linked above also points out how unmotivated the farmers were under this regime, cutting productivity even further. Those who have studied lean manufacturing, agile development, and DevOps are likely seeing parallels here.
The result was catastrophe. When a corporation is painfully inefficient it loses money and might have to do layoffs, but when a country fails at growing food, its people starve to death. I don’t mean to imply that central planning was the only cause of famine under communist rule - there were political operations that led to mass starvation, just like in the West - but learning more about these helped crystallize what I do truly prefer about capitalist models. It also converted the phrase ’the free market’ from a catchy slogan into something meaningful to me.3
The most important feature of free market economies is that each person within them is able to make independent decisions in their own best interests4. If you’re a farmer, you can decide what to grow, how much to grow, and when to work to develop your crop. Heck, you can even choose not to be a farmer any more. Success is merely dependent on your finding a buyer for your work at a price you can tolerate. Any given year might not be perfect, but your decision making gets better over time as you learn to respond to customer demand.
This pattern is easy to understand in any system where the people doing the work make the decisions. If you’re a jeweler, you can decide what to make, how much to sell it for, and what to spend your time on. Same if you run a small restaurant, lead local tours, or are a one-person shop doing house remodeling. It’s a free market, where you can charge what the market will bear, and you can quickly and efficiently respond to its whims, ensuring that you are getting the best use of your time.
This was a powerful organizing principle for a long time. The history of human commerce developed largely this way: One person, or as many people as could fit in one shop, would turn labor into a product, then find a buyer for it. Most large-scale efforts were organized by the state of the time: Monarchs and the landed gentry, who were the only ones capable of marshaling enough resources to build palaces, roads, and other large construction projects.
This began to change in the 17th century when corporations like the Dutch East India Company were able to deliver massive windfalls to investors by pooling money and using it to extract resources from colonies. There was a step change in the 19th century, as corporations went from generating wealth to building and owning infrastructure. It’s one thing to outfit a single ship for a year-long voyage, yet another to maintain railroad schedules across the United Kingdom, or run a telegraph network around the whole US. These aren’t just short-term money-making exercises, they’re long-term commitments with big capital outlays and large returns over years and years.
We still live in a free market economy, but it’s not one Adam Smith would recognize. Instead of individual or small operators, ours is composed almost entirely of corporations. Really big corporations. And these companies, they use the same kind of central planning that we so despise in communist systems. I know. I’ve done it.
By the time my company got near 500 people, we had a multi-week planning process, where the leadership (i.e., me and my lieutenants) set out top-level goals, built a top-down plan to accomplish them, then drew information from the front line to see where it needed change. We called this a bottom-up plan, but it was only bottom-up from the perspective of numbers - how much money we’d have, what our costs were, etc. - rather than from the bottom of the organization. We could see no way to have a system where the people doing the work built a plan for the organization. Even thinking about it now, my reaction is, “How would they know what my goals are?”
That’s the kind of question you can only ask in an authoritarian state, not in a free market economy. My goals became my company’s goals, and the only real way to ensure people worked toward them was providing a plan. You might argue that a corporation should focus on shareholder value, but that doesn’t help make decisions about what the company should actually do.
Great leaders find a way to listen to everyone in the company, but in the end, leadership is about making decisions. That’s essentially the definition of the word. And we all know leaders who did not bother to listen, or just did not need to in order to be great; today’s most vaunted tech leader, Steve Jobs, was famously disrespectful of the opinions of others, yet made a lot of world-changing decisions (not all for the better).
This is exactly why working in a big corporation is so stifling. If you’re in a small company, the executives are close enough to the front line that it’s more like working in a tribe, but in a big company, the leadership is so removed from whose who do the work that executive teams operate like the politburo we so decry in communist countries. Certainly the bureaucracies are no more enjoyable or forgiving.
I find it both ironic and painful that my inability to work for someone else resulted in my creating a company that involved a lot of smart, capable people working for someone else.
I wish I had a solution. If this were an easy problem, its solution would already be pervasive, because the benefits are massive. Just in terms of efficiency, we’ve seen how much better the free market is than planned economies, but it also has a hugely positive impact on quality of life. People are happier when they’re in control.
I know the solution is not more freelancing and contract work, which America’s corporations are addicted to. That’s the worst of both worlds: The exploitative nature of capitalism with the inefficient bureaucracies of communism. Transactions on the free market work because they’re good for both sides, but most people only accept part-time contract relationships today when they have no other real choices.
Holacracy certainly isn’t the answer. It’s fundamentally flawed because of its implicit power structure - Tony Hsieh still runs Zappos, even if he does not use a central planning committee to do it - but the biggest problem is it makes no mention of economics. Without a clear system for scoring the transactions (i.e., money) it’s impossible to build a free market.
This problem of how to handle economics within a non-hierarchical company might lead some to think of using blockchain tokens as an internal currency. This is impossible today, beyond the fact that the world of blockchain is mostly about fraud and black market sales. The biggest problem is that we have no idea how to value most of the work people do. I mean, we might know that what a developer should get paid for a year’s work, but how much is that work worth? The majority of the work done in modern corporations is incredibly hard to value, which is partially why companies are so inefficient and make so many bad decisions.
That brings up an even bigger problem - companies today hire workers to make money from their labor. In other words, they generate profit because they pay their employees less than they’re worth. If everyone could trade their labor for exactly the amount of money it was worth, the corporations that employ them would have a much harder time making money. Instead, in modern corporations the shareholders and the executive team - again, the central planning committee we so despise - make the majority of the money, while the front line does all the work and makes very little. This is true even at the big tech firms; software developers might be well paid relative to hotel workers, but they’re paid a pittance compared to the founders and executives. This might speak to why we have no solution yet - free market corporations would tend to reduce concentrations of wealth, which would be terribly disruptive to the current system.
Like I said, I don’t have a solution. But at least now I know what makes the current system so painful, and it gives me some hope that we actually can come up with a better answer. I know I’ll be working harder in the future to manage the downsides of what we have today.
Although I might stress the “well regulated” part more than most modern economists. ↩
The arrival of the smartphone has convinced the world of the value of great software design, but it’s not all good news
The smartphone has reached more people and delivered more value faster than any technology ever seen. Much of the world has had to adapt to this arrival, but software design suffered the greatest reckoning. As the smartphone ascended, developers finally adopted reasonable design principles, realizing that they could not pack every feature ever seen into the smartphone experience. This recognition of the value of design - and especially, minimal design - is a good thing. Mostly.
I could not be happier that the industry finally accepts that there are principles of design, and there is a practice and discipline behind building great software. It’s great that we’re seeing more focused software that does little, but does it very well, rather than the previous age of the GUI when software attempted to own large parts of our lives by doing anything and everything. For a long time, Microsoft Word was used by nearly everyone who had a computer, and their strategy was to ensure no one ever had a reason to choose something else by building every feature anyone might ever need; their toolbar was the canonical example of never saying no.
The smartphone changed all that. Those rows of icons would fill the screen on a phone and leave no room for typing, and of course, no one would use them anyway because of how different the usage patterns are. As people realized they could no longer just throw in the kitchen sink, they began hiring (and listening to!) actual designers, and those designers have been steeped in the culture of Dieter Rams and the minimalism of the Bauhaus movement, which is awesome. Mostly.
Unfortunately, the phone caused everyone to focus on the final design principle of Dieter Rams (“Good design is as little design as possible”), without apparently remembering the nine that came before it, or why they were earlier in his list. I get it; the design constraints in a phone are intense, and it might not be a good idea to minimize everything, but it sure is easy.
The consequence of this mobile brutalism is a new movement building simpleton tools: Software that anyone can use, but no one can become an expert in.
Trello is a great example. I adore Trello. I think it’s great software, and it’s clearly a success by any measure. However, for all that I’ve relied on Trello daily for years, I feel no more an expert than I did just after starting to use it. It’s not because I haven’t tried; it’s because there’s no depth. You can pretty much plumb the product in a couple of days.
That’s fantastic for getting new users up to speed quickly, but deeply frustrating after a couple of weeks. Or months. Or years. Compare that with Vim, which I still use for all of my code editing, yet it’s so complicated that most people don’t even know how to quit it, much less use it. I’m not going to claim its lack of user friendliness is a feature, but I will defend to the death that its complexity is.
Apple’s Notes is the ultimate expression of this trend in text editor form. It’s a fine text editor. I know some people have written huge, impressive programs in similarly simplistic editors like Notepad on Windows. But I personally could not imagine giving up keyboard navigation, selection, text munging, and everything else I do. The fact that complicated work can be done on simplistic tools speaks to the value of having them, but in no way invalidates the need for alternatives. Yet, on the current trends, no one will even be trying to build this software I love because they couldn’t imagine two billion people using it on a smartphone.
I think it’s fair to say that that’s an unfair standard, and even a damaging one.
I miss the rogue-esque exploration that tool mastery entails. It’s not that I want tools to be hard; I want them to be deep. I want to never run out of ways to invest in my tools. I don’t want to have to swap software to get upgrades, I want to upgrade my understanding instead.
But I look around my computer, and everything on it was designed for the “average” user. I was not average as a CEO with 40+ hours of meetings a week while receiving more than 200 emails a day, nor am I average now as someone who spends more time writing than in meetings. There’s no such thing as an average user, so attempting to build for one just makes software that works equally poorly for everyone.
It is a rookie mistake to conflate the basic user who will never plumb the depths of their tools with the expert user who will learn every nook and cranny of your software. It is a mistake to treat the person who sometimes has to solve a problem the same as a person who spends 80% of their time working on that problem.
I don’t want to be an expert in all of my tools - for all that I take thousands of photos a year, I don’t think I’m up for switching to Adobe Lightroom - but for those tools that I spend the most time in, that most differentiate me, I want the opportunity for true expertise. And I’d happily pay for it.
Back in the days when computer screens were tiny, there were plenty of stats that showed that paying for an extra screen would often give people a 10% or more boost in productivity. I know it did that for me. As a business owner, it was trivial to justify that expense. Monitors cost a lot less than 10% of a person’s salary, and don’t need to be replaced every year. Heck, the whole point of the automation company I built was to allow people to focus their efforts on the most valuable work they could do.
Yet, when it comes to software being built and purchased today, to the tools we use on a daily basis, somehow our software ecosystem is failing us. There is no calendar I can buy that makes me 10% better, no email client available that I can spend five years getting better at.
It’s great that people are finally making software that everyone can use, but that’s no excuse to stop making software for specialists, for experts, for people who could get the most advantage from that extra 10%.
The true story of trying to put Google’s planning system into use
When Google was less than a year old, they began using a planning system presented by legendary venture capitalist John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins. When I went to put it into practice at Puppet in the early days of growing the team, things were not as easy as they appeared. Success involved creation of a complete solution, not just a description of the documents you need to create.
When I went to try to use the system as described by Doerr, I had multiple questions it didn’t answer. Just to start with, when and how do you make and update these OKRs? It’s great to say you should have this recording of your goals, but I could easily come up with multiple conflicting mechanisms for developing it, none of which are obviously better:
The CEO could develop them independently and deliver them to the team
The executive team could develop them collaboratively
They could be sourced from the front-line team
None of these is obviously right or wrong, and of course, neither are they sufficient explanations for how to do it. Do you do it one sitting? Multiple revisions? How long should you spend on it? How often should you update them? Can you change them mid-stream if your situation obviously changes? There’s a lot left to the reader. You can say it doesn’t matter, but of course, it does, and even if you’re right, you still have to pick one. Why go through the effort of describing the output but skip the whole process you used to create and maintain it?
Here’s how we did it.
Startup Days
Starting by reading John Doerr’s original presentation, even though it’s relatively thin. In summary, you should have three to five top-level objectives, and each of these should have a couple of key results associated with it. Together these constitute a company’s Objectives and Key Results, or “OKRs”. These should then cascade down to the rest of your team, so that each team and person has OKRs. This is a useful high-level tool for communication and focus, even in small teams. (Note that I’ll use ‘goals’ and ‘objectives’ interchangeably here; far more people use the shorter term in practice, and we treated them equivalently.)
At Puppet, we spoke of an operational rhythm, which is essentially the set of repetitious tasks we run and the cadence we execute them on to keep the business working. But the OKR system as presented includes no operational rhythm, no indication that people are involved in creating these goals or that doing so takes any time. So we invented our own rhythm:
As early as possible each period, the management team meets to decide the company OKRs. This started out as a 45-minute meeting that just recorded the goals that were in my head, but evolved over years into a two-day offsite where the leadership team first acquired a shared understanding of where the business was and what we needed to do, then built the goals from there. In retrospect we should have put in these longer days earlier; your team should frequently think deeply about what you should be working on, rather than just running all the time.
The rest of the company has some time to build its OKRs from the top-level goals. Initially this was a couple of days, but it eventually morphed into a couple of weeks.
These cascaded goals are then used to modify the company OKRs if needed. (In other words, we supported a merged top-down and bottom-up planning model.) This is when management would learn if our view of reality was materially different from that of the people at the front line.
At the end of every period, the management team records how we did against our goals. Again, this began as just writing down the score, but grew to become a more complete retrospective run by a project manager. This meeting it at most a couple of hours long, and just includes the leadership team.
When we began this process, we wanted short-term goals, so we ran this cadence eight times a year; thus, we called our planning periods “octaves.” As we matured and could think and execute in a more long-term fashion, we reduced this to quarterly.
I think this system is sufficient for most companies of 15 to 250 people. Some companies might grow out of this at relatively few people, whereas others might scale very well with it. I expect most people could scale this system successfully by gradually increasing the amount of time spent on each session, with more time in deep discussion, and also by assigning a project manager to run it. I ran the whole process until we were probably 250 people, which was a mistake that took too much of my time, resulted in too centralized of an organization, and limited our effectiveness because I suck at project management.
Note that these are pointedly not plans; that is, they are not step by step instructions for how to achieve a goal. We’re declaring what we want done, but not how we expect to do it. This is both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, it provides a lot of freedom for people at the front line to figure out the right way of accomplishing something, but it also leaves a gaping hole in your organization. At some point, someone has to actually do the work, but where in your operational rhythm does a team translate goals into a plan for accomplishing them? Do you make that time? We didn’t until far too late, and it mattered.
Scaling
As we scaled the company and this system, we found a few critical gaps.
The biggest one is obvious enough that I cringe now just thinking about it. You would never try to build a product without being clear on who would do the work and, of course, you shouldn’t try to accomplish your company’s goals without assigning each objective and key result to an individual, yet our initial version (and the one presented by Doerr) had nothing to say on people. At some point we added the requirement that every objective had a name assigned to it, which was a huge change for us - and a really positive one.
The lack of accountability for each goal was exacerbated by the fact that we didn’t have any mechanism for in-quarter check-ins on the goals. We’d frequently only find out at the end of a quarter that a goal was going to be missed, when it was far too late to do anything about it. So we built a weekly operations review (“ops review”) where we reviewed progress against the goals. This meeting is a predictive exercise, not a status statement. Goals are green if you expect to accomplish them on time, even if you’re still two months away from the deadline. We mostly focus just on the areas we don’t expect to hit, which allows us to invest early in correcting our execution or changing our expectations.
It’s worth reiterating, because this was so hard to get people to understand: The goal of the ops review was not to describe the status of each goal; it was to build a shared understanding of whether we were likely to achieve our goals and then build an action plan to resolve the predicted misses. The majority of people entered that meeting with a belief that they needed to justify their paycheck, and it took a lot of education to get them to understand the real purpose.
This addition to our rhythm was pretty awesome. In one move, it basically eliminated the firefighting that had driven so much of our execution. We still had fires periodically, but they were actual surprises, not just sudden surfacing of old information, or realizing at the end of the quarter that a goal never had an owner.
The downside of the ops review is that it’s expensive (it necessarily includes a lot of top people at the company) and it takes a lot of work to make this kind of meeting worthwhile every week. I got the idea for this meeting from the excellent American Icon, about how Alan Mulally turned around Ford. A long, weekly operations review with his senior team was one of his key tactics. My team often complained that weekly was too frequent, but if a company as big as Ford was responding weekly to the conditions on the ground, shouldn’t a small startup be at least that responsive?
Around this time, we integrated the budgeting process into the planning process. It’s important to recognize they’re different - you should build the plan you want then find a way to budget for it, rather than building a budget for your departments then letting them decide how to spend it. It’s important that your should be good at both, though, and it was around this stage we started to develop the budgeting skill and learning how to integrate it into planning. That was painful, to put it mildly.
As we scaled, the company goals tended to get expressed in terms of departmental targets within sales, marketing, engineering, etc. When we were small, this seemed like a feature because it had natural lines of ownership, but as we grew it became clear it was a critical flaw. It’s important to translate plans to people and teams, but this was dysfunctional. It discouraged people from building goals that relied on other teams, and thus encouraged silos in the company. Talk about a failure mode. When we added names to each objective, we rebuilt the whole process to be structured from the top down around company goals rather than team goals, which allowed us to crack this departmental view and force shared goals and collaborative execution.
We also eventually added a layer of OKRs above our annual goals, giving us a roughly three year time horizon. These became crucial in sharing and deciding what the priorities were for a given year.
What might come next?
The above roughly describes the system as it stood when I stepped down from Puppet in 2016. It was obvious at the time that we were in need of another step-change in capability in our planning system, but the new CEO took responsibility for driving that. By the time I left, we could see many opportunities to improve what we were doing.
The big one is that we needed to push all the local knowledge about this process into code. We were using multiple different formats and tools, because different meetings require different interactions, and it was too difficult for most people to track what was happening, where, and why. For instance, our source of truth for the OKRs themselves tended to reside in Trello, but it’s a poor fit for storing updates and presenting the predictions of whether a goal would land. I couldn’t imagine trying to run a report on quantitive goals based on Trello data. Thus, we ended up storing the weekly updates in spreadsheets, which are exactly as powerful and readable as shell scripts. It meant we couldn’t trust most people to update the data, because the document was so complicated. I would have loved a single source of truth that anyone could use. In addition, I wanted to have an app automatically pull any data from original sources so I didn’t have team members doing manual work that could be automated (I mean, duh, Puppet is an automation company).
I also wanted a significantly better retrospective process that truly helped us improve the business by laying bare how our wonderfully laid plans went wrong. We were good at the work of looking back and being transparent about where we were, but there was a lot of room for improving how we tie that work to how we operate.
Lastly, I hate that our goals were built around quarters. I think having a cadence for building and validating plans is critical, but it’s silly that this cadence got translated into the timelines for the goals themselves. It often implied that each of our goals would take exactly a single planning cycle. Some obviously do - we have quarterly sales targets that we need to hit during exactly a quarter - but many of our top-level objectives were shoehorned into a quarterly system. I’d much prefer a Kanban-style on-demand planning system that would allow us to have a high-fidelity plan for what we’re working on now, and a quality backlog for what we’ll do as goals complete.
Conclusion
I’m not convinced it matters much what planning and execution system you use, but I’m utterly convinced you should have one. In the end, it’s merely a team-wide mechanism for developing, communicating, and tracking what you’re trying to achieve. It’s obviously important to have goals. I think most of us would agree you should, in some way, share those goals with the team so everyone is working toward the same ends. And, of course, your goals tomorrow should probably be somehow related to your goals today. (This is surprisingly hard.)
If you don’t have one yet, you could do worse than building an operational rhythm from what we built at Puppet. You’ll have to work through a lot of initial discomfort as you translate vague words into technical terms whose meaning is widely agreed upon around your team. But it’ll be worth it.
Most of our software is confused about what job we’ve hired it for
I’ve really enjoyed playing Zelda: Breath of the Wild, but my life has been changed more by one of its reviews than by the game itself. The review had a unique view on what made the game so great. It contrasted Zelda to other games - Destiny, for example - saying that while others tended to distribute gameplay across multiple areas (e.g., in Destiny, the radar is a critical part of the game), Zelda really focuses the game into the main screen where you walk, glide, ride, and fight.
The review (which I unfortunately cannot find, because of the quantity of posts online that all use similar words) called this “where the game lives”. I love what this phrase evokes. I absolutely loved the game Borderlands, but I was deeply frightened of ever finding out how much time I spent at its store screen, because item collection and management was such an important part of the game. A lot of its fun was specifically from the collection, rather than the playing, but that meant a large chunk of the game lived in the store, as opposed to out in the world.
Most of our software could use a similar dissection.
Like Destiny and Borderlands (which are both great, and quite similar), the tools we use show a surprising distance between what they help us do and what we’ve hired them for. If I may be permitted to steal from this review, this distance is a sign that our software is confused about where our work lives.
To pick a counter-example, I’m writing this post in Ulysses. People who choose this software laud its simplicity, which makes it easy to focus. What they really mean is, all you can do with it is write. There’s almost no formatting, very little organization, very little anything but writing. The work lives in the writing. (My first draft was written on an ipad, which further simplifies that focus.)
Contrast that with any task or project management tool. My wife and I are in the middle of planning a bunch of camping, and we’re using Trello to organize many of the options. What is Trello’s opinion about where the work lives?
Last time I looked, my wife had three browser windows open, each with about fifteen tabs. She’s also working in RoadTrippers (Pro, natch). To get this work into Trello is a process of copying, pasting, writing copy about why you pasted it, and then using Trello to file it so you can find and manage it later.
In this operation, where does the work live? It’s scattered across maps, calendars, browsers, and applications like RoadTrippers. Does Trello know that? Does it agree? How does its opinion of where the work lives affect its utility? Brief introspection leads us to conclude Trello has no idea where the work lives, and the humans using it are entirely responsible for connecting the two.
Here’s a simple exercise for anyone using a task tracking app: Envision yourself going into that app and just marking everything done, even though you obviously haven’t done the work. It hurts to even consider, doesn’t it? Your brain has absorbed that these tasks are representations of work, and it’s your job to match the representation to the work, because you know the tool won’t do it for you. When you mark something done, of course nothing goes out and does the work; you’re just lying to your software about the state of the world. And it has no idea! This disconnect is what leads to an allergic response to the idea of marking work done in software that is not yet done in the real world.
I’d like to say that Trello was just a bad example, but I think all task tools share this confusion. Bug trackers and project management tools are specialized examples of this, and they obviously have no idea where the work lives. If I’m writing code, all of the work is done in my text editor, in files on disk, and maybe in my testing tools to ensure the work is done and done right. I then go somewhere entirely different to mark the work done. Why? Shouldn’t GitHub know it already? Why do I have to explain it? The answer is because these trackers think tracking is the work, when of course, the work is the work.
It’s no better in personal tools. I just started using Things 3 for my own tasks, nearly all of which end up being expressed in email or calendars, yet Things 3 has no conception of either. It has no idea where my work lives, and expects me to put out all of the effort necessary to connect them.
Speaking of email and calendars, they have their own role in this conversation.
Email is interesting. Everyone hates it, because it’s so important to everyone that we use it constantly, yet this animosity is a result of its utility and criticality. In other words, people hate it because it works so well. But when you’re doing email, what work are you actually doing?
I’m not sure I know. You’re communicating. But usually, you’re communicating about some other kind of work, like a document, a meeting, or some kind of activity that takes place outside of the inbox. A well designed application will remove the need for communication via email - Google Docs is a great example of this. Its sharing and commenting features have allowed many discussions to move from email to where the work is, in the document itself; their addition of suggestions has doubled down on focusing on the work, rather than talking about the work. (Note that this is completely different from Slack, which advertises that it gets rid of email, by which it means it moves the conversation, not that it does a better job of bringing the work into the software.)
Of course, how do you have Google Docs tell you someone commented on your document? Email. :)
What about calendars? Why do calendars exist? As a tool, where does their work live?
I am thankful to have had to try to explain to a friend my position on this, otherwise I’d think it was easy to understand. It’s so counter to how people work today that a relatively obvious truth is impossibly counter-intuitive: calendars are about how I spend my time.
When using a calendar, the work is what you actually do. You, a person, out the in the world. That’s what the calendar is about. Its job is to ensure you do the right things at the right time, with the right people, in the right place. It’s about doing, not documenting, managing, or notifying. You can put something in a calendar and not do it, or do work that’s not in the calendar; any of us would say, obviously, that it’s what you do that matters, not what the calendar says. Merely creating an event has no effect, and thus no value; it only matters if it then affects your behavior. The work lives in what you do. But does your calendar make even the slightest attempt to directly manage how you spend your time? What would that even look like?
To pick a small example, my calendar apps seem to not care what city I’m currently in, or where I’m physically located. Isn’t this weird? The tool whose primary job is to manage where I am physically located makes no attempt to represent or take into account the core fact it is meant to control. It still dumbfounds me.
Yes, they can tell me in real time when I should leave for a meeting based on travel time (as long as travel involves driving, rather than walking down the hall to a conference room), but they can’t say, “Given that on Tuesday you’ll be in Portland, working from home, you should block out travel time to get downtown to lunch and back”. That is, they can alert me in the moment, but they can’t do their core job - reserving time to ensure I’ll be doing the right thing in the future. Because they can’t do this, I have to create those blocks myself, else I’ll find myself choosing between skipping one appointment or being late to another. The whole point of a calendar is to manage time, but in this simple example they fail to ensure I will have space to transition my corporeal existence between physical locations. Shouldn’t that be step one, rather than an exercise left to the human?
I also reserve time for tasks I do alone every day, like working out and writing. I do this primarily to ensure it gets done, rather than because those times are special (although I do get a bit jittery now if I don’t write first thing in the morning). There’s no way to explain to my calendar what I’ve actually blocked that time out for, and thus no way for it to respond to whether I’ve done it or not, even though my computer knows if I’ve done my writing, and my watch knows if I’ve worked out. Wouldn’t it be great to see your calendar dynamically rearranging your day because it noticed you missed your workout?
My calendar is confused about what work I’ve hired it to do, and therefore does not know it needs to look in those places.
We’re so used to the idea that our software represents the work that we seem to have lost hope that it will actually help us do it. Most of the tools we use are entirely disconnected from the work they’re supposed to help us with. Marking something done does not do it, deleting email does not indicate communication has happened, sitting at your computer while your calendar says you’re writing does not produce text. The representations are not the work, yet we forgive our tools for only dealing in representations, not actual work.
I don’t know if that reviewer was right about why Zelda: BoTW is so great. I can’t even imagine what all the software I use would look like if it were built around where my work lived, rather than merely being used to model and manage it.
What I do know is that our software can and should be built to help us do the jobs we’ve hired it for. But because it is confused about why we use it, what we do every day is lower quality, less fun, and just downright confusing.
This also shows just how much opportunity there is to improve the software we use on a daily basis.
I’m a tech founder and recovering SysAdmin. I helped found DevOps and grew up in open source. These days I am convalescing from a decade of physical and mental neglect while running Puppet.
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