Transaction costs are unavoidable, and with a scaling team, these drags of coordination slow every team down. It’s a law of business physics.

Here’s Venkatesh Rao, commenting on this excellent slide deck from Alex Komoroske:

There is no villain responsible for this. Coordination simply becomes vastly more difficult far earlier along scaling trajectories than people realize. Things get worse than you expect, sooner than you expect. This is coordination headwind. It’s an exponential snowballing phenomenon.

I agree that it’s an inevitability....

Arnold Kling raises interesting points here about the nature of big companies. The incentives and physics of large company dynamics essentially demand that they move slowly. Sometimes this slowness looks like indecision or lack of conviction (and sometimes those are in there), but for the most part it’s a function of the upside/downside balance. As a business expands, the downside for failure starts to outweigh the upside of success:

Amar Bhide, in The Origin and Evolution of New Businesses, classifies business opportunities along two dimensions: capital...

Often you hear product teams talking about their roadmap in investor-like terms. Managing their upcoming initiatives like a financial portfolio, distributing their bets among things of various categories, sizes, and risks — like a portfolio manager would do to hedge risk. Umang Jaipuria makes the case that product teams should be inverting this logic: concentrating their bets (and therefore, money and energy) behind fewer things.

All product teams should have ONE bet they are making, and put all their effort into making that successful. The fact of the matter...

An epic post from Steven Sinofsky about all forms of meetings, when to use them, when not to use them. The list of dysfunctions and countering tactics is full of gems.

The thing is that most people say they don’t want to have meetings. Most say “oh that meeting could have been handled with an email or slack message”. They might be right. But that is only if you take the meeting literally. Meetings mean so much more to a company than conveying information or deciding.

Meetings are literally how cultures are formed, values expressed, and companies made.