Potatoes, good taste, and 10x teams 💡
Monday ideas — Edition #152
1) 🖥️ Scaling your business is hard. Scaling your infra shouldn’t be
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2) 🥔 From handoffs to hot potatoes
In many teams I have seen, the relationship between functions only goes one way. PMs pass requirements to designers; designers pass UI to developers, and developers write code. That’s it.
The very word handoff seems to suggest this. You do your part, send it to the next guy, and it’s done!
While this may work for small features, most projects instead greatly benefit from continuous back and forth collaboration, in what Brad Frost calls “The Hot Potato Process”.
Ideas are frequently passed between designers, developers, PMs, and back, for the entirety of the creation cycle.
Again, this is nothing new — it is iteration and collaboration, instead of "waterfall".
You can take the same advice and apply it to almost any company process: can you make it less handoff and more hot potato? Chances are it’s going to improve.
3) 🤖 AI rewards taste
These days AI is constantly pushing the boundaries of what I feel like I should do myself vs what I should delegate to magic computers.
There's some FOMO in this for sure, but quite often I find myself wondering what is truly my place, and where is it that I can bring value that is not going to be replaced soon by a new LLM.
I don't have an answer to this, but I often go back to the idea of taste and skills.
For me, great taste is knowing what’s good, and great skill is knowing how to build. Taste and skill work together for growth: whenever my output is subpar with respect to my taste, then I know I need to improve my skills.
There is also a third element, that I can often find in very experienced people. They do not only know what is good — they also know exactly why. They know what makes good things good.
This is less trivial than it seems.
I may watch hundreds of TV shows and develop a good, intuitive taste for good ones, but I may not be able to explain how my judgment works. And that is fine, unless I ever want to create a TV show. At that point, closing the gap becomes crucial, because knowing what makes good things good is what ultimately allows my taste to turn into skills.
I believe that, with AI, the value of our pure skills is dropping by the day, while the value of our taste is increasing.
Good taste is what creates the most leverage. It has probably always been so, but AI is making it obvious.
So the #1 question for growth becomes: how do I improve my taste?
I wrote a full essay about this two years ago, which is still one of my favorites 👇
4) 🏆 How to turn normal teams into 10x ones
A couple of months ago, Charity Majors quietly delivered the most popular Refactoring article of all time, where she argued that instead of focusing on 10x engineers, we should focus on 10x teams.
So, how to turn a normal team into a 10x one? Here is her advice:
1) 🤏 Shrink the code-to-production time — minimize the gap between writing and deploying code to reduce cognitive load. Aim for single-commit deploys. Longer cycles create a "software engineering death spiral" where batched changes lead to slower deploys and reduced velocity.
2) ↩️ Make it easy and fast to roll back from mistakes — devs should be able to deploy their own code, figure out if it’s working as intended or not, and if not, roll forward or back swiftly and easily. No muss, no fuss, no thinking involved.
3) ✅ Make it easy to do the right thing and hard to do the wrong thing — wrap production interfaces with thoughtful design and guardrails. Build systems that empower engineers to make changes quickly and safely, while accounting for high-stress scenarios. The fastest way to ship code should also be the safest.
4) 🔍 Invest in instrumentation and observability — you’ll never know what the code you wrote does just by reading it. The only way to be sure is by instrumenting it and watching users run it in production. Good systems invest heavily in tools for sense-making. You shouldn’t have to be a world-class engineer just to debug your own damn code.
5) 🔧 Devote engineering cycles to internal tooling and enablement — engineering productivity needs dedicated ownership. When everyone is responsible for deployment speed, testing, and tooling, no one truly owns it. These systems require dedicated attention to maintain quality and user-friendliness.
6) 🤗 Build an inclusive culture — growth and continuous learning are the baseline. An inclusive culture means everyone feels safe to question, explore, and learn from mistakes, while being held to high standards with proper support.
7) 👨🎤 Diverse teams are resilient team — teams of engineers with similar backgrounds can move fast but are at risk. A diverse team with varied genders, backgrounds, identities, ages, family statuses, locations, and skill sets is more resilient and better equipped to handle unexpected change when life happens.
8) 🪜 Assemble engineering teams from a range of levels — the best teams balance senior and junior engineers. Everyone works on challenging tasks that push their growth — no one is stuck doing routine work. Team members constantly learn from and teach each other, creating an environment of continuous development.
You can find the full, incredible piece by Charity below 👇
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I wish you a great week! ☀️
Luca