[Oldletter #14] Undifferentiated heavy lifting, Vertical vs horizonal thinking, and The Tiny MBA
Every Friday, I’m sharing a short list of evergreen articles/resources broadly related to software engineering that wouldn’t typically get shared in most tech newsletters or social media feeds.
This week’s links
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Identifying Undifferentiated, Heavy Lifting (2019) by Stephen Kuenzli. “Undifferentiated, heavy lifting” is a phrase bandied about a lot, particularly in the cloud space. In this piece, Stephen explains how to uncover it using a Wardley Mapping worked example, ultimately in service of understanding how value is being delivered in a software system.
Every product adopted by customers provides value in some way. That value is provided by a system of components and people (aka entities) that have responsibilities ranging from the application used directly by a customer to the object store where that customer’s data is persisted. Each of those entities must fulfill their current responsibilities or delivery of customer value is impacted.
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Vertical vs Horizontal Thinking (2012) by James Hughes. Why entrusting developers with end to end vertical feature slices makes adapting to change much easier.
…there is one very fundamental reason vertical is better. Working and thinking vertically allows you to create a shippable product early. It’s not all done, far from it. It probably looks like ass as well but still it’s usable enough to get the job done, right?
- The Tiny MBA (book) (2020) by Alex Hillman. This one’s more about product (and business) building than software engineering but it’s one of the most evergreen things I’ve read. It list out 100 long-game principles and anecdotes in a uniquely tiny format. It’s one of the very few physical books I’ve bought in recent years and dip into regularly.
Submitting your recommendations
If you’d like to share an evergreen article/book which has significantly influenced your thinking or practice around software delivery, please email it through to me and I’ll add it to my backlog for sharing in future editions.
Have a great weekend!
— Paul
Paul Swail
Indie Cloud Consultant helping small teams learn and build with serverless.
Learn more how I can help you here.
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