Hypergrowth, the power of love, and agile values💡

Monday Ideas — Edition #134

🧑🏽‍💻 Packmind Tech Coach — code quality in the age of AI

A couple of weeks ago we teamed up with the guys at Packmind to discuss how code quality changes in the age of AI.

As AI tools like Copilot reshape software development, here’s how the best teams stay ahead:

1. ✅ Define — Instantly turn team standards and decisions into actionable coding practices.

2. ⚙️ Deploy — Seamlessly integrate your practices into every developer's IDE, like a linter on steroids.

3. 🔍 Enforce — Ensure alignment and quality in both human and AI-generated code.

To do this, this week I am happy to promote Packmind Tech Coach, which I am a big fan of. Packmind bridges the gap with team-specific standards and real-time guidance—keeping your codebase clean and maintainable.

You can learn more about it below 👇

Back to this week’s ideas!

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1) 🚀 Will we ever see hypergrowth again?

Earlier this year I interviewed Aditya Agarwal, employee #10 at Facebook and, later, CTO at Dropbox.

In both companies, Aditya found himself in hypergrowth stages, where the headcount would double every 6 months or so. To succeed in hypergrowth, leaders need to become comfortable with uncertainty and change, and accept that, at any given time, there will be a thousand small things that are broken.

People’s jobs also change fast with scale, so you need people who are willing to learn and grow fast, instead of finding comfort in repetitiveness.

Teams who survive hypergrowth are those who are humble, hard working, and keep learning.

But here is the thing: Aditya believes we will not necessarily see again the same hypergrowth scale as we saw in the past decade.

As technology gets better, engineers and managers get more productive, and companies are able to achieve more with less employees. Facebook is much smaller than e.g. Microsoft, and a new Facebook today would be much smaller than the old one.

In general, Aditya believes the whole management model that has been long promoted by big tech and Silicon Valley companies feels overblown today. You don’t need the same amount of layers and managers anymore — Aditya advocates for a flatter structure with empowered engineers making technical decisions.

You can find the full interview here 👇

Facebook, Dropbox, and Modern Engineering Teams — with Aditya Agarwal 🎙️

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2) ❤️ The Power of Love

Every once in a while I go back to the teachings of Bill Campbell, whose story is told in the Trillion Dollar Coach, which we reviewed last year.

Among other things, Bill believed in breaking down the walls between the human persona and the professional persona.

He encouraged executives to talk to their employees about their personal lives, learn about their families, and care about them as people, not just employees. Instead of saying, “How are the kids?” Bill would say, “How was Hannah's last soccer game?”

Here is how he put this into practice:

Do favors for others 💁

Bill was generous with his time, money, and connections. Whenever he could pull a few strings, he would, without asking for anything in return.

Most of us think of favors differently depending on the recipient — but Bill would say, just do it. Especially in cases where such favors are asymmetrical: they may require only a few minutes on our side, but mean an awful lot to the recipient.

When you play the long game of good relationships, doing many favors is like sowing the ground: eventually, you reap the rewards.

Practice people skills 🍻

Caring for colleagues takes practice.

You may be a natural at this, or you may be more of an introvert who is not exactly enthusiastic at the idea of daily personal chats.

In any case, you can practice this, like a muscle. Start with small exchanges, like making eye contact when you walk into the office, asking a co-worker how their day is going, or having little elevator chats.

Then, like in BoJack, it gets easier:

Everyday it gets a little easier, but you gotta do it everyday. That’s the hard part. But it does get easier.

Connect with people 🔗

Bill believed in building community, rather than just teams. He believed in creating long-lasting connections between people, both inside and outside of the workplace. The book is full of examples of this:

• He formed a Super Bowl group who would travel together to attend each year.

• He held frequent golf and fishing trips.

• He invested in a sports bar in Palo Alto for friends to hang out at.

You can find my full review of Bill’s story and teachings below 👇

Trillion Dollar Coach 📕

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3) 💫 The Four Values of Agile

Last week I interviewed the legendary Martin Fowler, and our full chat will soon go out on the podcast. Among other things, we discussed the state of Agile in 2024 (spoiler alert: it’s not great!) which made me go back to the original manifesto.

If we take the 12 original principles, I believe we can extract 4 major themes — which are still very relevant today:

1. 👥 Work closely with stakeholders — good communication with stakeholders is a primary factor in any project's success. Agile has long preached about keeping customers in the loop and welcoming requirements' changes, over clunky long term plans.

2. 🚚 Work in small batches & deliver incremental value — splitting work in small deliverables is key to the health of your development process. Small batches lead to frequent releases, which in turn make the feedback loop faster and reduce risk.

3. 🏅 Give teams agency — the best results I have seen in software have always been delivered by diverse, cross-functional teams who had the skills and trust to independently iterate over a product.

4. 🎨 Promote simplicity and good design — good design means minimizing the work to be done, both right now and in the future, and this mostly comes from good communication.

I wrote a full critique of the Agile manifesto in this newsletter edition 👇

An Agile Manifesto for Today 📜

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I wish you a great week! ☀️

Luca