Communication Structures in a Growing Organization

I don’t think I’ve worked at a company whose website satisfied me. It never gives me a clear explanation of what our product does. After a few years working closely with Marketing, I finally understand why. As a developer, my goal is to provide useful capabilities to people through the software I work on. To ... Read moreWhy is every startup’s...

I think of “command and control” as one thing. Is there a difference? That common phrase notwithstanding, command and control are two alternative structures, more opposites than synonyms! Command (like in the military) allocates responsibilities to parts of the hierarchy. So a general is tasked with winning a war, and each officer under them is...

In a startup that sells software, what is the “business” side of the company? When I worked in retail, developing software for internal use, there was a clear division between the engineering teams in IT and the Business, where people understood retail products and how to run a store. But now that I’m in a ... Read moreWho turns software into...

Last year I got my first experience of implementing software internally. My team found a SaaS (software as a service) product they wanted to use, so we bought it and used it. Sort of. It was NOT SO EASY. There’s money to pay, and that has to get through several rounds of budget approvals, and ... Read moreHow hard can it be to buy software?

a keynote from CppNorth This one is about everything else that a team needs to accomplish, besides writing the code, in order to provide useful capabilities to people.