Are you simplifying things or introducing unnecessary complexity?
Learn about the art of simplification and business terminology you need to know to understand your company
The top article in this digest talks about the art of simplification. Most importantly, about how it is underrated. It is not rare that people who simplify and remove things (even though their simplifications add a huge amount of value), are less visible and recognized than people who add unnecessary complexity. As removing is somehow perceived as less “productive” than adding.
I love the article as it kind of raises the awareness on this topic.
Not many articles in this digest, only five, so dive right in!
The Art of Simplification: Why We (over) Build When We Should Simplify (5 min) 💵
Scarlet Ink
This article reminds me of the concepts of accidental and essential complexity introduced by Fred Brooks in the year when I was born 🙂 Essential complexity is inherent to the problem you are solving and accidental complexity is the complexity you added as part of the solution for the problem you are solving (there was a great article on this ToT digest in December). Dave Anderson argues that removing complexity and simplifying things is very much underestimated.
When you add a feature, push code, or collaborate with many engineers, your contribution is very visible. Whereas activities such as sunseting a feature, removing unnecessary UX, brutally descoping the thing that your PM calls an “MVP”, removing code, or never even writing it at first place (aka best code is no code at all) have very low visibility. Even though being less visible, often these “simplification” activities have higher value than their visible counterparts.
Keep that in mind next time you add five different design patterns to implement a simple CRUD operation. Or when you define your MVP, where 80% of it are nice-to-haves that will take up the same percentage of efforts to implement as well.
Be brutal when de-scoping features🫸. Simplify, remove, or even better, don’t write code at all if possible.
Audience: Software Engineers / Engineering Managers / Product Managers
Value: Learn the value of removing features, code (best code is no code), and many other things
ToT Rating: ⭐⭐🌟
20 Business terms every Engineering Manager should know (10 min)
Leading Developers
I recently read a company-wide document outlining the company’s business strategy for the next several years. The document contained many business terms whose meaning I did not understand. I asked ChatGPT for help, it gave me some great explanations and at the end I even created an annotated version of the document and shared it with others. The timing of Anton Zaides’s article coincides with this, so I fully get the value of learning these terms.
As an EM, you need to know business terminology to understand the business you are operating in, and communicating business strategy to your engineers is important as well. The good thing is that although the terms seem scary at first, they are quite simple to grasp.
Audience: All professionals
Value: Learn 20 important business terms
ToT Rating: ⭐⭐🌟
6 Simple Ways To Answer Unexpected Question From Leaders (5 min)
The Uncommon Executive
You are presenting a feature, technical design, or an improvement proposal, and boom, there comes a question that you never thought of and for which you do not have an answer 😧. You freeze, don’t know what to say, and you feel stupid for setting up a meeting without knowing the answer to this question. You start sweating 😓 and get nervous and don’t know what to do. This article will tell you how to handle this like a boss 😎.
Audience: All professionals
Value: Learn how to answer hard questions during important meetings
ToT Rating: ⭐
The dark side of solopreneurship: Myths vs. reality (6 min)
The IndiePreneur
Perhaps you dreamed of starting your own business and still did not do it due to being anxious about the things that could go wrong. In this article, Orel Zilberman shares five myths associated with solopreneurship and realities behind them. These might either help with removing some of that anxiety (as you will at least learn about the reality of the solopreneurship journey) or amplify it 😆 and you will realize that being your own boss is not your cup of tea.
Audience: (Potential) Entrepreneurs / Solopreneurs
Value: Learn about the downsides of solopreneurship
ToT Rating: ⭐
Thinking in Maximums (13 min)
Arjun Shah
There is a lot of thought out there that promotes “MVP mindset” where you ship something fast, get it into the hands of customers and then learn and iterate from it. Even in this very digest I advocate for “brutal MVP de-scoping”. This article talks about the downsides of the MVP mindset if not combined with a proper long-term vision.
Audience: Software Engineers / Engineering Managers
Value: Learn about the downsides of “MVP mindset”
ToT Rating: ⭐
Today’s digest was not that long, hopefully you made it to the end!
See you on Monday! 👋
Loved the idea to annotate a company document! :)