The power of defaults

January 10, 2022

#71 – January 10, 2022

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this week's favorite

The world’s most successful companies all exhibit some form of structural competitive advantage: A defensibility mechanism that protects their margins and profits from competitors over long periods of time. Business strategy books like to refer to these competitive advantages as “economic moats”.

Multipliers make or mar engineering organizations - teams that invest in boosting the right capabilities at the right time will get more done with less. Teams that neglect these capabilities will eventually get bogged down – they’ll get less done with more.

Technical debt is often a challenge in startups, especially during periods of rapid growth. In 6 years, we went through many stages, forming our approach on how to deal with it in a big mobile application, which I shared in the article.

After a couple years in government I used to blow peoples’ minds with a fairly simple party trick. Before going into our first meeting with a new agency stakeholder I would predict several key details of what their problems were going to be. All I needed was the name and title of the person we were meeting.

One of the struggles organizations face is getting lost in the decision-making process. Many leaders either use a lot of authority or seek consensus. More often than not, they stick to one decision-making style for everything. Conflicts happen, hearts get broken, frustrations come from every direction, resulting in resignations. The inflexibility in decision-making is at the root of various problems.

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