211–220 of 262 posts
The value of collaboration, just like most other things, depends on implementation and circumstance.
I think the real problem here is "decision making" as opposed to "collaboration" I can't think of a single time where having someone else review my work or give me feedback is a meaningfully bad thing. It's an opportunity to learn. But getting feedback is different to making the final decision. Instead, the real problem is the either 1) lack of knowing who makes the final decision or 2) requiring everyone must agree…
This is the key insight for me about this post, and I fully agree with you. No collaboration means less opportunities for learning from people (even the post admits!) that are "better at what you are doing than you are", which imo stunts personal growth. Decision makers need to be clearly appointed, accountable, and empowered to follow through. But that power then also comes with listening to feedback from all releva…
Not necessarily. You get biggest insights about quality after you ship, not before. Slowing down means you ship later, which means the insights are delayed. Unless you work in a rocket industry et all, slowing down will be detrimental to the quality.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
One of many reasons I left Apple. My manager's manager would say stuff like this all the time, and then when I actually made my PR he would basically have me redesign stuff from scratch. It made me dread working on projects because I knew that no matter what I did I would be forced to rewrite it from scratch anyway.
Yuck. The attitude I like to have is that the author can choose to do the design (doc + approval, or live discussion, some kind of buy in) first or go straight to the PR. If the design is agreed on first, reviewers would need a really good reason to make the author go back and rethink the design—it happens, sometimes a whole team misses something, but it should be very rare. Usually, there's just implementation thing…
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Have fun with that. At the end of the day you run into the same problem as most wikis, where people just "threw stuff over the wall" into a big wiki database, and it gets to be really difficult to find relevant decisions. Eventually people add a new decision that contradicts an older decision that they didn't find, then later on someone with better search skills finds both contradicting decisions. It doesn't help anyone. All you did was increase the cost of making a decision by forcing a higher documentation cost, which slows down the business.
Most companies looking at structured decision making are better off with a better approach to writing internal policy, which is a kind of technical documentation. You need someone to own the meta/framework surrounding policy (clean presentation, different ways for different questions to reach the same policy, handling the workings of how different owners have permissions to control their areas of policy, making sure stakeholders are notified of changes, etc.), and a culture of collaboration which encourages people to propose changes to outdated policy (and not just dismissing them out of hand). Good policy simplifies decision-making: either it's already allowed by policy and people are free to continue without bureaucracy, or a proposal to change policy results in a tangible artifact already in the relevant place, either the accepted proposal or an addendum to the policy explaining why alternatives were rejected.
I think the real problem here is "decision making" as opposed to "collaboration" I can't think of a single time where having someone else review my work or give me feedback is a meaningfully bad thing. It's an opportunity to learn. But getting feedback is different to making the final decision. Instead, the real problem is the either 1) lack of knowing who makes the final decision or 2) requiring everyone must agree…
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There’s a balance somewhere put there, but that balance is different for everyone.
Personally I think problematic decision making is more to do with the “blame” side of ownership. It benefits the unsure more than the certain, and not many people are okay with making and admitting to mistakes.
Collaboration is useless in deterministic predictable environment with a single source of truth. When you deal with lot of ambiguity,constant changes and need to adapt then you have no choice that collaborating and getting a feedback loop.
You can win alone, but you can’t lose alone.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Every delivered feature is a liability not an asset. > If you don’t believe me, consider two products that make customers equally happy and one has half as many moving parts . Which one is more profitable to maintain? Wrong analogy, use the word feature in both emphasized terms. Consider two products and one has half as many features , which is more profitable to maintain? Well, it depends whether people are paying…
It’s a perfectly fine analogy if you can get over your own ego enough to realize your customers don’t want to hear about how very clever you are, they just want to get shit done and move on to four other tasks. They don’t care about us. They don’t. They just want to do what their boss asked them to do or kill the bad guy to get the treasure, and we are often enough as much in the way as we are facilitating that.