Systems Thinking

I had intended to write a big long post on all the things I learned as a Product Ops leader as Tanium for a year, but it got long and rambly, so I’m going to attempt a series of shorter posts that will hopefully get written. Lesson one, when you are working on process of the product team, you are building engines not fuel. This is a metaphor from my good friend Jack Coates (Part 1 Part 2) that he usually applies to building end user products that need content, and that no one wants to build content and teams want to build engines because they are fun and sexy....

Working with some colleagues recently I was asked “Why aren’t we doing all the things to really be [desired state], we should pause and think about how we really want to restructure the company and the way we build software to do it right.” My colleague has a great instinct and she isn’t wrong in seeing the gaps that we have in the product and how we produce software. But I think that its important to apply systems thinking to solving these problems. That requires us to understand where we can apply leverage to change the balancing feedback loops that are enabling and constraining our products. ...