The Soul of a New Machine

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Hi:

I have been playing with the idea of blogging about books that I am currently reading and I have decided to go ahead and do it just in case someone might find interesting what Program Managers at Microsoft read or get training on. I usually read a lot so I won’t bore you with everything I finish but rather post only on those books which I have obtain some insight from or think are great references. These blogs will not try to give a review of the book but rather tell you what stayed with me and how I am thinking of applying it to my work. As I do this I am open to feedback and comments you guys might have so feel free to also share your opinions and stories.

This month I read two of them The Soul of a New Machine and Freakonomics. They are both good books but for our industry and definitely for what I do I think the first one bears more applicability. For detailed reviews of the book you can go to https://www.amazon.com/dp/0316491977 or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Soul_of_a_New_Machine .

Things that stayed with me

è Innovation carries a great tax. Some of you might already know this but it is incredible how many people fail to actually recognize and do something about it

è Behind every great product release there is an even more impressing team story. You can say this in almost every industry. Surely there are individual stars that account for a lot of the success but a team is the one responsible for the failure or success of a product

è Great products require great leadership at several layers of the organization. There are times during a product’s development where you are going to hit a low as a team, where a hard decision needs to be taken or when adjustments are needed. For those times more than ever the leadership team is what takes your product from good to great

è Don’t let prior knowledge and experience dictate all of your decisions. Let your stars shine even if you think the task is impossible to accomplish. Practice trust

Applying the above

è Establish a team’s identity. Just as the Miami Heat were “15 Strong” last season when they won the NBA championship the “Microkids” in this book united to succeed. You might find this kind of stuff silly at times but a team’s identity brings everyone together and acts as the strongest glue. For over 4 months now our Version Control team is called “Blue Team”. Why blue? Well we will keep that a secret for now.

è Manage Innovation. There is still a lot of innovation to be done in TFS and I am really excited about it but at the same time we have to be careful because many teams have failed when doing this much. We have a new process: Feature Crews, we have three new big ideas that will take months and months to implement, and we have to support Vista and Office 2007. Our solution: divide the work into phases and make sure at the end of each phase the product is ready to ship. This way we as a team can always see our progress and we are continuously delivering value.

è Take risks. There are times were you might think that a given tasks is impossible to accomplish. For those times do your research, assemble the best team, give it support and send the GO signal. We surely did it with merge before we shipped version1 and we are going to do it again with several other big features.

The soul of a new machine is a considered a classic and after reading it I now understand why. Hopefully you will enjoy it as well.