Ask Your Developer is an excellent read on business strategy from the rare CEO who actually codes. The key theme in the book is that, for many companies, software is now a profit centre rather than a cost centre – it is a source of competitive advantage. This means that it should be done in-house, rather than being outsourced. But that begs the question: how do you run a software-centric organisation, attracting dev talent and maximising their value?
It’s no longer a question of Build vs. Buy. Rather, it’s the existential question of Build vs. Die.
Lawson, being both a CEO and a developer, is in the perfect place to answer this. He believes that software development is a creative activity. Therefore, you should give devs problems, rather than just a list of program specifications. Build a customer-centric culture where devs go out of their way to try to solve problems for their users
If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea. —Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
In addition to discussing macro tech trends and mental models for thinking about software developments, Lawson spends a great deal of time discussing how he organises teams – this was my favourite part of the book. His philosophy, based on his experience at Amazon, is to organise the company into small teams (at most 10 people), each of which acts like a startup, that provides services for the other teams in the company.
There are some nice links between this organisational philosophy and the field of complex systems. Complex systems are often hampered by a lack of instant feedback – for example, in firms where software developers never interact with customers. Organising the system into smaller subunits can free up information flow and lead to better outcomes (explained in Thinking in Systems). This technique has been applied in several other variants across history; Superforecasting discusses the auftragstaktik used by the Wehrmacht (to be clear, one can respect the efficiency of the German military while decrying their objectives and deeds), in which the top brass specifies objectives, but leaves implementation down to individual section commanders.
Ask Your Developer is short and to-the-point, with extremely clear thinking from a proven operator. Lawson does a fantastic job of summarising his wisdom into one-liners that anyone in a leadership position (tech-related or otherwise) would do well to remember:
What matters isn’t how you use servers, but rather how you serve users.