TBM 303: The Current Tech Puzzle (With Diverse Takes)

This newsletter post is an experiment. I pose a question on social media, give my two cents, and then share the thoughtful answers from a diverse group of people.

The Question

This is a vast oversimplification, but I see five key problems in many tech companies currently:

Problem #1 — Work Around Work

Managers are bumping up against many dependencies, duplicative administrative tasks, an onslaught of mind-numbing meetings, constant calls to detail tradeoffs, shifting strategies, and a call to focus more on performance management. To quote a manager friend: "The work around the work is drowning me."

Problem #2 — Get Into Details, And…

In addition to the work around the work, managers are being asked to "get into the details." This would be fine (desirable, even) under normal circumstances, but combined with Problem #1 it is too much work. Something has to give, so the real question is, "What must I sacrifice?" 

The undercurrent here is that #2A front-line teams are filling out engagement surveys complaining about how difficult things are, so #2B leadership is responding to that with more calls for managers to get into the details because it is impractical for them to do so. No one wants any surprises.

Problem #3 — New Normal. No Stink

With persistent fear of layoffs, no one is willing (or able) to call out #1 and #2 directly. Managers are told this is the new normal and making a stink is frowned upon. No one wants to admit the sheer impact of #1—what's an extra meeting or two? Amidst the rallying calls for efficiency and productivity (amidst the fear of layoffs), teams are playing an ever more elaborate game of Tetris instead of focusing. Of course, this exacerbates #1 and means there are even more details to "get into." It isn't like job hunting is a picnic these days, so people are much more likely to accept the new normal, often correctly assuming that it is the same everywhere.

Problem #4 — It Takes Time

It takes time to meaningfully make a dent in reducing cognitive load and fostering conditions friendly to more independent teams, or at least teams that feel more independent. You can't just do a re-org or org-flattening. Meaningful change takes changes to the architecture, code ownership, product ownership, business model, etc. This means that unless you reduce WIP (hard because of Problem #3), you will have Problems #1 and #2. Plus, teams are getting distracted by shiny objects and pressing concerns, which brings us to…

Problem #5 — Naturally Hectic

Whether AI, the macroeconomic climate, the push for profitability, shifting trends in SaaS, or [any number of factors), things are naturally hectic. This is like a huge amplifier. If before you had meaningful shifts every 12-18 months, now teams are being buffeted around by changing priorities every couple of months. Managers will get pulled into mind-numbing meetings about AI strategies, productivity, profitability, etc. This increases #1, adds challenges to #2, and makes investing time in the "boring" work harder to refactor and improve (#4).

Note: I added Problem #6. It is not in the original post.

Problem #6 — Layer on the Fatigue

To cap it off, you're adding #1-5 on top of (for many people) a lot of fatigue from the last 3-8 years. Imagine you worked your ass off before a pandemic. Then you worked your ass off during a pandemic—maybe throw in raising a child during that, Long Covid, etc. And now we are struggling through all the belt-tightening, layoffs, etc. I was at a picnic recently, and the "unfiltered" talk among Director + folks with kids was so heavy.

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So What?

So what can we do about this?

You can do things—like limiting work in progress, sharpening priorities, limiting planning inventory and activities, reducing administrative overhead, establishing clear "stop the line" protocols, establishing a tempo, and using healthy enabling constraints, etc. The problem is these normally challenging yet relatively straightforward interventions are hard in this environment (notably because of #3, #5, #6).

Note: I added this part.

It is easy to pin the situation (and the fix) on "leadership," but:

• They also have managers, or at least people putting pressure on them.

• The sheer extent of the drag and friction is foggy, abstract, and hard to grapple with

• In many cases, they ARE encouraging more transparency, but it is hard to regain the trust of their teams. Teams are withholding information, establishing workarounds, and generally in opaque survival mode.

• In many cases, leaders encounter competitive and petty behavior in middle management, and even between teams, it is not their immediate doing or something they can instantly fix.

Yes, leaders wield formal authority and power (and make more money), but they are not clairvoyant gods. They have feelings. They get burnt out. Perhaps most importantly, with all the factors above, it can be very hard to figure out a coherent view of what is happening. "Everyone complains about too many meetings, always, in every company I've worked at," remarked a friend. "Is it worse? What's different?"

I have wavered here in terms of giving advice. I have my own biases and go-tos. My recommendation would be:

1. Leadership needs to be very explicit about the behaviors required to get out of this and ensure all explicit or implicit incentive systems support these behaviors.

2. Start REMOVING things right away. Forget about adding new stuff for a bit. Focus on removing things that don't add value. Are OKRs all smoke and mirrors? Remove them. Do goals mean nothing? Remove them.

3. Due to the volatility overall, we don't count on annual planning. It is a lie. 

4. Force-ranked priorities that make sense to everyone and don't need management translation. Everyone in the company should feel empowered to say "No" without running things up the chain.

5. Create forums where leaders, managers, and the front line can have conversations that get real.

6. Perhaps most importantly, create some sort of predictability amidst unpredictability. Create a tempo. Create some sustainable normalcy. 

Other (Better) Takes

But that is my biased take. Here are a bunch of smart people and their takes:

Yi-Wei Ang

Forced stack ranking and bringing the prioritization conversation to the top. The role of leadership is to really recognize that rebuilding a cadence starting with a limited WIP is the only sane way forward.

Trey

Establish a clear process for concerns. Model how it's used to shape and communicate priorities. If it's not being used, insist on it being used and reward its use. It's like a lightning rod. The potential charge is going to build up to catastrophic failure if it's not positively directed.

Deming would probably say to measure less. Too many measures that aren't the bottleneck redirect energy from things that matter. Often, the assumption is that problems occur because people aren't suitably engaged, competent, or individually efficient rather than because they're not getting enough concentrated time on critical tasks.

Jake 

At this point, is "burn it all down and start again" at least as feasible as the other options?

Jonas

For any individual caught in this, I'd say the best option is to leave unless you have good reasons to think things will change for the better. Sure, things may be just as bad at the next place, but the desire to stay is probably just the sunk cost fallacy talking.

Erietta

Clear strategy or better yet near term vision (3-5 years not some mystical future) as foundation to any roadmap or tactical work. This provides context and shared purpose that can make the noise make a lot more sense. Also, no tech or product strategy/roadmap that has no relationship to the company strategy.

Lucas

I think it's a cause and effect chain with #5 as the root. Specifically, #5 caused layoffs and other shifts in the ecosystem, which drives #3, which drives #4, which drives #2, which drives #1. With this diagnosis, I propose the following.

How you fix this depends on where you are in the org.

CxO's / VPs - Change the planning and commitment cadence to meet the increased paced of change in the market. This will hurt (a lot) but it will allow the organization to stop reacting and start proacting again which should unlock the rest of the chain.

Directors - Gather metrics for performance within your organization. Present the problem to your peers and ask for their input on solutions. Present the problem to your directs and ask for their input on solutions. Select and implement solutions within your domain that protect your productivity metrics while seeking to cut the link from #3 into #4. Your productivity metrics are your shield, don't lose them in exchange for warm fuzzies.

Line Managers - Start interviewing to get a taste for the market and make a decision about whether to fight this fight or not. If you do, focus on being reasoned and bold in trying to cut the link from #2 to #1.

ICs - Establish boundaries, slow-search for work.

Patrick

Current hypothesis of a solve given that all of these things have likely hit a point of no return… [1] restore a business rhythm that meets all of these needs more proactively and [2] build culture and connections so that some of these things happen more casually and healthily

Bob

None of this is surprising or unexpected. Tech is rapidly maturing and, as such, is seeking a new equilibrium. As a result, it's going to be messy and chaotic for another few years. 

The thing that's worked best for me is to shed my expectations, stop comparing the present moment to a past moment, stop thinking I alone have the solution (or even fully understand the problem), and try my best to observe the situation with an open mind, aiming to be realistic about where things are and where they're going.

Simon

From my experience and learnings from theory of constraints: not limiting planing inventory (backlog) is causing issues downstream the most.

Jane

Manage the managers. Lead the leaders.  We often consume leadership without nudging our leaders in the right direction. I think this is one of the biggest shockers for people upon promotion. Everybody is still guessing and learning and making mistakes even when their job starts with "Chief".

Adrian

What I did was schedule a meeting every afternoon for all of my team with themselves to do coding. If you wanted to disturb them, it would have to be in the morning. I guess managers could do something similar for themselves.

Kate

My current thoughts are that;

#5 probably needs individual development of distress tolerance (DBT language) or equanimity (Buddhist language) 

#3 need political activism to create a safety net for people who get fired for rocking the boat

The rest will be exceedingly difficult to get traction on without 3 and 5 because they depend on people willing to look at painful realities.

Valerie

This is so true and I believe it's the cause of engineering manager layoffs at all levels as 'they don't code and they don't add any value' whereas in reality managers are drowning in low value work. And the doom loop you've described makes it extremely hard to fix.

Change has to come from the top. If there's no understanding or empathy there, and willingness/investment/skill at senior level to fix it the folks on the ground are goosed. 

Unfortunately, many tech leaders are specialist IC types who can't empathize with or understand the power of great management. They just let the doom loop spin until they sack the managers.

So we need to fix the broken leadership rung at all levels to even think of fixing the doom loop.

Ken

I believe #3 is the crux of this.

If it's taboo to talk about the problem, you're going nowhere fast. The situation will become more toxic, as the teams fall further behind leadership requires ever-more observability so they can see what's going on. Trust breaks down, requiring even more documentation.

Fixing this needs

1: allow dissent/discussion/change/failure.

2: low managers have to communicate up better.

3: senior managers have to communicate that up better.

4: stop development by committee, so managers at all levels are encouraged and applauded to make decisions and stand by them.

This is all going to be very difficult when investors are banging the drums trying to push the company in one way or the other, especially in pre-profit startups.

Wendy

I have noticed that some things must be called out by the leadership from the top.

For example, in the case of too many unnecessary meetings, it's easier just to go to the meetings and waste your time if your manager is a meeting person, and not attending a meeting is frowned upon. However, when your CEO sends out an email saying you don't have to go to a meeting unless you have an important role to play there, you are suddenly free of many of the meeting duties; imagine this multiplies with thousands or even tens of thousands of people.

Ahmet

You know the story about Alexander and the Gordian knot, or Steve Jobs' actions when he returned to Apple. 

Every corporate executive team has too many different ambitions. You need to make a bet on one space. 

Instead, everyone is diversifying and running multiple parallel efforts everywhere. 

I have trained 300+ PMs in the last 5 years. After working with 10+ companies, I have yet to meet a single PM with only a single product. 

Most have 3-5.

The product portfolios and service offerings are all over the place. Teams are fighting legacy fires while innovating at the same time. 

At some point, you just have to cut the knot and clean house, starting at the top. Reduce complexity, to reduce 5, then 2, then 3, then 4. 

Instead, layoffs and reorgs get you 3, 5, and then all the rest.

Morten

The old management tools and strategy techniques are still needed, and we need to improve our use of them. 

However, the context is changing and demands adaptability more than predictability. 

This leads me to look at portfolio management first (to address overload and disconnect) and then open strategy. Right now, the crux of the problem that freaks people out is that false degrees of freedom fuel stress and frustration.

Vishesh

Building an environment of trust where you do not always need to question and investigate the details of your teams' decisions can also help. Creating an environment where failures are acceptable (though not always possible) and seen as learning steps also reduces this burden.

Nicole

Limiting WIP is THE key: doing fewer things better and more collaboratively. You protect yourself from technical debt and force yourself to prioritize while building in functional redundancy - no need to ever worry about someone leaving and no one remaining knowing how to Fix The Things. But limiting WIP requires COURAGE! Courage to focus and REALLY drive the outcomes you want (and need). Courage to give up on the weekly illusions of progress that too many managers are now addicted to, like story points and burndowns. Courage to realize that people can be MORE productive if they have LESS on their plate. These changes require a philosophy shift in leaders, who (often) have been rewarded by doing the opposite. They can't see how much MORE rewarded they would be if they refused the status quo.

Sri

Very well said! Double-clicking on #5: There are different phases, including market conditions, customer readiness, capability maturity, economic willingness to pay, competitive alternatives, and more—each corresponding to a different "gear,"... and yet most teams driving products are often stuck in just "one fixed gear". As a result, the philosophy, beliefs, leadership expectations, OKRs, team readiness, etc, are often assumed to stay static despite the changes outside of the firm's boundaries. 

Firms, teams, and leaders who recognize this and allow "gears" to shift up / down / differently as needed will be significantly better positioned to address #1 and #2 above.

Abhishek

You already mentioned limiting work in progress. I have found it to be extremely effective against #3. It solves for #1 through fewer meetings and fewer things to trade against, leaving more time to focus on managing performance. It also makes it easier for me to get into the details. The time I return from #1 and #2 gives me enough cognitive space to think/act on #5. 

Instilling a culture of limiting progress is hard, and it takes time, but teams catch on quickly once they operate that way. I encourage starting with any seemingly random heuristic (a team of 6 takes no more than 2 planned initiatives) and iterating from there.

Ray

#5 is driving a lot of the organization's dysfunction. It reminds me of the quote from Apple 20+ years ago: "Isn't it funny, a ship that leaks from the top?" If you want to fix an org that is sinking, focus on the top of the org structure. Unfortunately, this isn't where executive teams want to look; instead, they inflict a lot of chaos and stress down the chain.

Many orgs are currently in a situation where their business model does not look positive in the long-term. They have a choice, get lean to right size their adjusted forecasts or innovate. 

Many established orgs have been in "protect the asset" mode for 20 years. Getting lean or innovating is not the competency of the existing leadership team. We all know self-preservation is a strong natural behavior. Expect to see boards clean houses over the next few years and bring in either Private Equity or consultants to take bold action while also taking a big hit on valuations.

Hope you enjoyed the post!