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Ask HN: Dev promoted to more strategic role in startup. What literature?

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Re: Ask HN: Dev promoted to more strategic role in startup. What literature?

#11
Honestly I would get a mentor. Find someone either in your org or out of your org that has the skills and career you would like to work towards and start talking to them. If you hit it off you may have found someone who can help you through the bumpy parts of your career and help you plan your next steps. Some people charge for this as career coaching and that can also have some value but it's challenging to sort out the best ones. Every place I've gone I've looked for a mentor to bounce ideas off of and generally double check my thinking and how I'm approaching problems and my career. You can go to industry events and start reaching out or just look for people you admire and reach out and start a dialog.

I personally think the concept of apprenticeship is lacking in the technology industry and we loose out on what other older professions have with clearer career paths because of their established practices of guiding people though their careers. That said I've seen it abused too so there always needs to be balance in these things.

I personally coach about five people (for free) in my current company and they come from all areas of the org not just my group. I was very lucky in the early days to have several great mentors in my life who helped me and I feel it's my job to pay that back now in the latter years of my career.

Books are wonderful but nothing beats interacting with successful people.

Re: Ask HN: Dev promoted to more strategic role in startup. What literature?

#12
post #2

If you're looking for a book on strategy, you can't go wrong with Peter Drucker. http://www.amazon.com/The-Essential-Drucker-Management-Essen... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Drucker

Can't forget Moshidora (What If the Manageress of a High School Baseball Team read Drucker's "Management"): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moshidora

Re: Ask HN: Dev promoted to more strategic role in startup. What literature?

#13

Disclaimer: my day job is helping companies continue to operate at scale the same as they did when there were only 5 of them. Turns out this is not a trivial thing to do. Agile/XP practices are a good starting place in-between cowboy programming and micro-management hell -- as long as you don't take them as a recipe book. They're simply best practices that you can and should learn. Then prune/modify as necessary. The…

Links to the books Drive: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004P1JDJO and Peopleware: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0321934113/ for those who are worried about clicking url shortners

DanielBMarkham has been on this site for a long time and is pretty well known, so I would trust him not to put shady links.

I also heartily agree with him that lots of business books are best digested as summaries - look them up on wikipedia, for instance. The fundamental problem is that many have a simple idea, but you can't sell a 10 page book. So it gets fluffed up with lots of case studies and extra material until it's long enough to sell as a book.

Re: Ask HN: Dev promoted to more strategic role in startup. What literature?

#14
post #10

The best book bar none that I've read about strategy is "Good Strategy, Bad Strategy" by Richard Rumelt: http://goodbadstrategy.com/ I highly recommend it. It's clear, intelligent, properly defines what strategy is (which most other books fail to do) and isn't, and how to go about designing and implementing it. It's very low on bullshit and very high on examples and insights from both history and business.

"His strategy was to risk his lead ships in order to break the coherence of his enemy’s fleet."

He defines strategy incorrectly. He means "tactic". I think the problem is that "strategy" sounds more important, but it irks me every time someone confuses the two. (The US military thinks the difference is merely one of the size of the operation, which is also wrong.)

Nelson's strategy at Trafalgar was to have a decisive battle versus a skirmish. He wanted to destroy the French navy (and was willing to risk everything to do it).

Re: Ask HN: Dev promoted to more strategic role in startup. What literature?

#15
1st "Thinking in Systems" http://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Systems-Donella-H-Meadows/dp/...

2nd Article "Leverage Points" http://www.donellameadows.org/archives/leverage-points-place...

after these two you will have enough know-how on how to identify and manage systems (i.e.: your growing company)

then the only thing between you and success is reality, for how to influence the company reality you live in please read

3rd "Seeing Systems" http://www.amazon.com/Seeing-Systems-Unlocking-Mysteries-Org...

good luck and have fun (with the books, with your new responsibilities)

Re: Ask HN: Dev promoted to more strategic role in startup. What literature?

#16
Understand Lean paradigm as a way of delivering business value: http://www.amazon.co.uk/This-Lean-Resolving-Efficiency-Parad...

In terms of agile - I believe that scrum and related are too operational-related and not really strategic. You can skip that and delegate crunching it to others.

Master delegation - 1 minute manager, etc. - read at least one short book about it. Don't fall into micromanagement trap.

Re: Ask HN: Dev promoted to more strategic role in startup. What literature?

#17
post #10

The best book bar none that I've read about strategy is "Good Strategy, Bad Strategy" by Richard Rumelt: http://goodbadstrategy.com/ I highly recommend it. It's clear, intelligent, properly defines what strategy is (which most other books fail to do) and isn't, and how to go about designing and implementing it. It's very low on bullshit and very high on examples and insights from both history and business.

"His strategy was to risk his lead ships in order to break the coherence of his enemy’s fleet." He defines strategy incorrectly. He means "tactic". I think the problem is that "strategy" sounds more important, but it irks me every time someone confuses the two. (The US military thinks the difference is merely one of the size of the operation, which is also wrong.) Nelson's strategy at Trafalgar was to have a decisive…

You cannot define something incorrectly. He can very well define "strategy" as something, you would label "tactic". That does not make it incorrect. It is great that a definition is done for an overloaded and ambiguous word like "strategy".

I have not found a good clear definition for "strategy" and "tactic". Could you give yours?

Re: Ask HN: Dev promoted to more strategic role in startup. What literature?

#18
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"His strategy was to risk his lead ships in order to break the coherence of his enemy’s fleet." He defines strategy incorrectly. He means "tactic". I think the problem is that "strategy" sounds more important, but it irks me every time someone confuses the two. (The US military thinks the difference is merely one of the size of the operation, which is also wrong.) Nelson's strategy at Trafalgar was to have a decisive…

You cannot define something incorrectly. He can very well define "strategy" as something, you would label "tactic". That does not make it incorrect. It is great that a definition is done for an overloaded and ambiguous word like "strategy". I have not found a good clear definition for "strategy" and "tactic". Could you give yours?

In chess, strategy is long term, tactic short term. A tactic has a very concrete goal, and in a few moves you will be able to say "it worked" or "it didn't work". A strategy has a more abstract goal, and sometimes you won't be able to tell to what degree it worked.

Re: Ask HN: Dev promoted to more strategic role in startup. What literature?

#19
post #9

Here is what I did when I moved from development to product & Marketing 1. Follow people in the same field 2. Ready up on blogs and posts : I use Zite, Flipboard and medium 3. A book that helped me to a large extent is Good to great by Jim Collins ( http://www.amazon.com/Good-Great-Companies-Leap-Others/dp/00... ) Also The Personal MBA by Josh Kaufman http://www.amazon.com/Personal-MBA-World-Class-Business-Educ... 4.…

Josh's book is great - he sums up a lot of thinking from other books. He also has an account here, IIRC. Jim Collins, on the other hand, seems to write kind of empty books without much actionable advice. In my opinion, at least.

Re: Ask HN: Dev promoted to more strategic role in startup. What literature?

#20
I recommend the http://www.manager-tools.com site for lots of really great content on practical leadership & management. As for process ... yes, you can read all you want, but at the end of the day your success will be defined by your ability to sell a good idea (SDLC/ALM processes) to your team, not the pure quality of the processes themselves. If people don't want to or can get around process, they will.

I've never worked in a startup, but I run my teams as if they were small, fairly-independent-but-often-symbiotic entities. I started as a dev back in '99 and am one step below CIO in a 45,000 employee large corporation. If you'd ever like to chat about your problems or bounce ideas off someone, I'd be happy to.

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