Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
Build teams like terrorist organizations
The cost of collaboration
Collaboration carries a hidden coordination cost, and that cost keeps a team moving only as fast as its slowest node. No executive ever tells a company to collaborate less, which is a warning sign in itself. At high-growth companies, product managers also end up making calls the founders would have made themselves six months to two years earlier.
Culture and structure
A good terrorist organization runs on the same two ingredients. It has an ideological culture in which everyone understands why they are doing what they do, with the strategy working almost like a religion. It also has a plain structure that shows who is trusted with which decision, who is single-threaded on something, and who is the throat to choke.
Vision in short phrases
Together they let a team reach the result collaboration would have produced, without the meetings. The head of product at a founder-led company works as a vessel for the founder's vision, so the job is to absorb that vision and boil it down into short phrases the whole team can repeat, each one a shortcut to the full strategy.
Why do bigger teams coordinate so slowly?
Fred Brooks laid out the arithmetic in his 1975 book The Mythical Man-Month. The number of possible communication paths among n people is n times n minus 1, divided by 2, so five people have 10 paths and ten people have 45. Brooks used it to explain why adding staff to a late software project tends to make it later. Each new person adds the work of keeping everyone else informed.
How do armies run without constant orders?
Prussian officers developed a doctrine called Auftragstaktik, usually translated as mission-type tactics, during the 19th century. A commander states the intent and the goal, and subordinates choose how to reach it. The approach is associated with Helmuth von Moltke the Elder, who held that no plan survives first contact with the enemy. NATO armies later adopted versions of it under the name mission command.
Where does the single-threaded owner idea come from?
Amazon uses the term single-threaded leader for a person whose only job is one initiative. It is tied to the company's two-pizza teams, small groups that can be fed with two pizzas. A named owner removes the question of who breaks a tie. Colin Bryar and Bill Carr describe the model in their 2021 book Working Backwards.
More from Lenny's Podcast: Product | Growth | Career
