Biweeklycast

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Dima explains why "we'll build a reliable system" makes him twitch, and he and Slava work out what it takes to turn such a promise from wishcasting into something you can believe.

• Simple characteristics correspond to intrinsic properties one can build directly: a square house, a red car, a four-minute song
• Other characteristics – reliable, comfortable, fun, effective – one can't "build" directly. They can only be derived from other, simpler properties of the thing
• Dima believes that promising a derived characteristic without explaining how it will arise is wishcasting. One cannot mandate "from Monday the team will be effective" – they have to take specific step so that as a result the team becomes effective
• Dima's approach to talking about promises for derived characteristics
• Slava argues that the "what" should come before the "how": teams jump straight to solutions without a shared map of what reliability means and miss pieces they haven't run into previously

References:

• Why the green great dragon can't exist – order of adjectives in English
• Biweekly 52: Needs Analysis — the chain of results from actions through outputs to outcomes you can't produce directly

"I'm sorry, could you explain what is a great question? Because I think it can be quite subjective." — Slava

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Dima poses that every product feature falls on one side of a "hygiene bar," and he and Slava explore where that line sits, how it shifts over time, and whether the idea can become more than his own intuition.

• Ranking every feature on one universal scale assumes they're commensurable, which is rarely true
• Jim McCarthy's five feature categories(from Dynamics of Software Development): strategic, competitive, customer satisfaction, innovation, paradigmatic
• Other models pointing at similar asymmetries. For example, the Kano model and Terry Hill's order qualifiers and order winners

• Dima crystalises this into the idea of a hygiene bar. Below the bar, a missing feature penalizes the product but having it earns little. Above the bar, features differentiate, but only once the product already clears the bar
• Hygiene bar is an expression of the market. Shifting hygiene bar allows to trace how market evolves. E.g. Command strips moved the market of "means of hanging things on walls"
• McCarthy's categories and the hygiene bar: strategic and customer-satisfaction features sit below the bar, competitive features sit above it, and investment features stay neutral until a later release. Paradigmatic features are the odd one out: they move the existing bar, pushing new requirements onto competitors.

"Apples are apples — you can't make a paradigm shift with an apple as a product." — Dima

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Dima introduces jingle and jungle fallacies — two ways labels can go wrong — and takes Slava through examples to show harder cases that are easy to miss.

• Names and labels help to compress knowledge and facilitate communication, but the label is always distinct from the thing it denotes
• Jingle fallacy — using the same label for two different things and treating them as one
• Jungle fallacy — using different labels for the same thing and treating them as different

• In Ukrainian, different shades of blue have distinct words — the same object would carry genuinely different meanings depending on the speaker's language
• The failure-to-differentiate and failure-to-converge cases are harder to spot and fix than miscommunication. Because of that consequences can be more damaging
• Jingle and jungle can also be weaponised — deliberately conflating or splitting concepts in rhetoric to mislead

"I would say that I probably had a jangle fallacy about jingle and jangle fallacies." — Slava

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Dima poses that "trust" plays an important role in how we execute multi-step processes, and together with Slava they explore the implications.

• Process is a sequence of steps where each output becomes the next step's input — and before it can, trust in that output must be established
• Three ways to establish that trust
• Slava argues trusting yourself as executor is a stretch — you know when you cut corners
• Formal vs informal verification
• Trust evolves — first you check every output, then you trust the person, eventually you trust them to define the procedure themselves
• For repeated processes, optimise the trust mechanism rather than verifying every output each time
• Slava suggests what matters is defining success criteria — definition of done; how it's done is secondary

"This is a good coffee because I brewed it." — Dima

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Dima and Slava find that scaling productivity with AI likely means going from a faster tool to running a team of synthetic labour — and that the challenges of delegation are nothing new.

• Productivity with a tool vs. productivity with an agent: a tool allows you to do things better/faster and with an agent you set it an objective that feeds into your bigger goal
• Agentic threshold: the executor must pass judgment rather than just carry out instructions
• Synthetic labor — AI agents you delegate work to
• Verification Tax: it is more effective to delegate tasks that take long to do but are easy to verify — verifying by re-doing the task yourself defeats the purpose
• ICs delegate to themselves, managers delegate to others
• Delegating to others is a distinct muscle that needs development
• Slava is worried that most managers don't operate at the higher levels of delegation even with real people
• Building the pyramid down — AI lets an IC build a hierarchy of agents below them, compressing what used to require climbing the corporate ladder

"Do this for me is a tool. Do it with me is borderline. Think for me would be closer to agency." — Slava

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Dima brings up the concept of Directly Responsible Individual (DRI) and he and Slava debate how it differs from RACI, when each approach shines, and what it would take to actually adopt DRI culture on a growing team.

• One problem with side projects that executives start: even a fixed time commitment may not be sufficient to effectively drive them
• Directly Responsible Individual (DRI) — one person with end-to-end accountability and decision-making authority for a project or outcome
• RACI — Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed
• DRI vs RACI: DRI assigns single end-to-end ownership focused on outcomes; RACI assigns responsibility at the task or stage level
• Dima is not a huge fan of how DRI is portrayed in The GitLab Handbook
• Slava: are DRI and RACI really that different?
• Switching to DRI: shift accountability to outcomes, not actions — empower the DRI to determine how to get there
• Results chain was discussed in Biweeklycast #52: Needs Analysis
• Consent-based (vs consensus-based) committees as an alternative path to fast decisions
• The party planning thought experiment: three DRIs, one shared budget — a case where the model strains

"There are so many ways to make people irresponsible." — Slava

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Dima and Slava build a conceptual triangle to look at a manager’s role and generally do their best to highlight different facets of the job managers are expected to do.

• Other related episodes
  • On leadership
  • On business processes
• Definitions
  • PMI: “Management is the process of leading a team to achieve goals within given constraints.”
  • Harvard Business School: “Managers are responsible for setting strategy, executing plans, allocating resources, and leading people to achieve organizational objectives.”
  • Slava’s: “A manager does stuff to achieve things.”
• Team – Manager – Company triangle
• Manager as the team–company interface
• Team is the smallest unit that can carry the culture
• Manager’s work at different levels of company structure
  1. Line manager: team of individual contributors
  2. Middle manager: team of managers
  3. Executive manager: team of managers of managers
• Coaching style management, again

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Dima and Slava have read a book about business processes and discus what it means to follow “process approach”.

• Book “Unmanageable. What you need to know about business processes?” (in Ukrainian)
• Processes vs. Projects
• What is a good, useful description in a process?
• From stockpile of policies to process approach
• Business processes interact with organisational structure and culture
• Optimisation of business processes is a common demand from Ukrainian businesses

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Dima and Slava discuss how management relates to leadership, signs that can point to lack of leadership, and what leadership misses can entail.

• Management is the process of planning, organizing, and controlling resources to achieve objectives efficiently and predictably.
• Leadership is the ability to offer compelling vision and inspire, influence, and guide people toward a shared goal.
• Failure modes of management without leadership
• No value added by a manager at their level on managerial hierarchy
• Manager not having an opinion about team’s role and place
• Manager not taking responsibility for their decisions and actions
• Manager acting as an external consultant to the team
• Coaching leadership style

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Dima and Slava discuss the complexities of estimation in business contexts and the challenges of striking the balance between ambition and realism.

• Estimation, forecasting, and projecting
• Desired level of confidence for the estimate makes a difference
• Short-term vs long-term estimation
• 50/50 goals
• Benchmarking is helpful when you do something novel
• Working backwards can help in planning projects
• Is your thing really a special snowflake?
• Illusion of precision, or precision bias
• Realistic estimated vs ambitious goals

Estimation and benchmarking was also discussed in Biweeklycast #36 How Big Things Get Done.