📺 Watch this episode on YouTube.

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

📺 Watch this episode on YouTube

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

📺 Watch this episode on YouTube

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

📺 Watch this episode on YouTube.

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

📺 Watch this episode on YouTube.

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.

📺 Watch this episode on YouTube.

Dima is doing his best to explore a particular flavour of ambiguity and Slava keeps him in check by sticking to definitions and anchoring the discussion to reality.

• Ambiguity – the quality of being open to more than one interpretation
• Is ambiguity merely a lack of proper definitions?
• Approaches that help in dealing with ambiguity
• Explicit definition of how success looks like
• Clear definition of the problem to be solved
• Validate hypothesis with real-world inputs

• At times, dealing with ambiguity requires a leap of faith

📺 Watch this episode on YouTube

Dima and Slava explore Richard P. Rumelt’s book Good Strategy Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters and share insights they took away from the book.

• https://www.amazon.com/Good-Strategy-Bad-Difference-Matters/dp/0307886239
• https://www.amazon.com/Strategy-Safari-Through-Strategic-Management/dp/0743270576
• The Kernel of Strategy: diagnosis, guiding policy, coherent actions
• What does coherence have to do with policy and strategy?
• Building on your strength is a great foundation of strategy
• Bad strategy is the result of a leader who’s unwilling or unable to say “No”
• Cut through that “strategic fluff” with focus on concrete and specific elements
• Don’t trust examples from business books. Do your own research
• 6 reflections after reading the book
• Rating the book: 3 and 5 out of 10

• The greatest closing quote ever by Dima Malenko: “Think for yourselves!”
• Check out other bookclub episodes of Biweekly

📺 Watch this episode on YouTube.

Dima and Slave talk about what strategy is and what strategy isn’t.

• From Wikipedia: Strategy is a general plan to achieve one or more long-term or overall goals under conditions of uncertainty.
• Dima’s characteristics of a strategy
1. Multi-step plan, a “pattern of decisions”
2. Built on a particular world view
3. Aims at global (long-term) maximum
4. Does not rely on competitors making favourable choices
5. Requires agency and ability to execute
• Different flavours of strategy: business strategy, product strategy, etc
• Not every entity needs a strategy

Vision without execution is a daydream. Execution without vision is a nightmare.

📺 Watch this episode on YouTube.

Dima and Slava count priorities and discuss how having to count priorities is a problem in and of itself.

• Dilution of terminology: priorities, KPIs…
• “Focus” is a good alternative that is expressly singular
• Priority: importance vs ordering
• Does priority get most time or the best time?
• One with 10 priority tasks gets to choose what the true top priority is
• Priority management cultures: collective and individual
• Does need for prioritisation arise having a lot more work that one can do?
• Have a stack of priorities and be very explicit about them
• Limit number of top priority items that you have at any given time

📺 Watch this episode on YouTube

Dima and Slava discuss the end of the second season of Biweeklycast and talk about what to expect in the upcoming third season.