Advertise on podcast: Biweeklycast

📺 Watch this episode on YouTube. Dima explains why "we'll build a reliable system" makes him twitch, and he and Slava work out what it takes to turn such a promise from wishcasting into something you can believe. Simple characteristics correspond to intrinsic properties one can build directly: a square house, a red car, a four-minute songOther characteristics – reliable, comfortable, fun, effective – one can't "build" directly. They can only be derived from other, simpler properties of the thingDima believes that promising a derived characteristic without explaining how it will arise is wishcasting. One cannot mandate "from Monday the team will be effective" – they have to take specific step so that as a result the team becomes effectiveDima's approach to talking about promises for derived characteristicsSlava argues that the "what" should come before the "how": teams jump straight to solutions without a shared map of what reliability means and miss pieces they haven't run into previously References: Why the green great dragon can't exist – order of adjectives in EnglishBiweekly 52: Needs Analysis — the chain of results from actions through outputs to outcomes you can't produce directly "I'm sorry, could you explain what is a great question? Because I think it can be quite subjective." — Slava

📺 Watch this episode on YouTube. Dima poses that every product feature falls on one side of a "hygiene bar," and he and Slava explore where that line sits, how it shifts over time, and whether the idea can become more than his own intuition. Ranking every feature on one universal scale assumes they're commensurable, which is rarely trueJim McCarthy's five feature categories(from Dynamics of Software Development): strategic, competitive, customer satisfaction, innovation, paradigmaticOther models pointing at similar asymmetries. For example, the Kano model and Terry Hill's order qualifiers and order winnersDima crystalises this into the idea of a hygiene bar. Below the bar, a missing feature penalizes the product but having it earns little. Above the bar, features differentiate, but only once the product already clears the barHygiene bar is an expression of the market. Shifting hygiene bar allows to trace how market evolves. E.g. Command strips moved the market of "means of hanging things on walls"McCarthy's categories and the hygiene bar: strategic and customer-satisfaction features sit below the bar, competitive features sit above it, and investment features stay neutral until a later release. Paradigmatic features are the odd one out: they move the existing bar, pushing new requirements onto competitors. "Apples are apples — you can't make a paradigm shift with an apple as a product." — Dima

📺 Watch this episode on YouTube. Dima introduces jingle and jungle fallacies — two ways labels can go wrong — and takes Slava through examples to show harder cases that are easy to miss. Names and labels help to compress knowledge and facilitate communication, but the label is always distinct from the thing it denotesJingle fallacy — using the same label for two different things and treating them as oneJungle fallacy — using different labels for the same thing and treating them as differentIn Ukrainian, different shades of blue have distinct words — the same object would carry genuinely different meanings depending on the speaker's languageThe failure-to-differentiate and failure-to-converge cases are harder to spot and fix than miscommunication. Because of that consequences can be more damagingJingle and jungle can also be weaponised — deliberately conflating or splitting concepts in rhetoric to mislead "I would say that I probably had a jangle fallacy about jingle and jangle fallacies." — Slava

📺 Watch this episode on YouTube. Dima poses that "trust" plays an important role in how we execute multi-step processes, and together with Slava they explore the implications. Process is a sequence of steps where each output becomes the next step's input — and before it can, trust in that output must be establishedThree ways to establish that trustSlava argues trusting yourself as executor is a stretch — you know when you cut cornersFormal vs informal verificationTrust evolves — first you check every output, then you trust the person, eventually you trust them to define the procedure themselvesFor repeated processes, optimise the trust mechanism rather than verifying every output each timeSlava suggests what matters is defining success criteria — definition of done; how it's done is secondary "This is a good coffee because I brewed it." — Dima

📺 Watch this episode on YouTube. Dima and Slava find that scaling productivity with AI likely means going from a faster tool to running a team of synthetic labour — and that the challenges of delegation are nothing new. Productivity with a tool vs. productivity with an agent: a tool allows you to do things better/faster and with an agent you set it an objective that feeds into your bigger goalAgentic threshold: the executor must pass judgment rather than just carry out instructionsSynthetic labor — AI agents you delegate work toVerification Tax: it is more effective to delegate tasks that take long to do but are easy to verify — verifying by re-doing the task yourself defeats the purposeICs delegate to themselves, managers delegate to othersDelegating to others is a distinct muscle that needs developmentSlava is worried that most managers don't operate at the higher levels of delegation even with real peopleBuilding the pyramid down — AI lets an IC build a hierarchy of agents below them, compressing what used to require climbing the corporate ladder"Do this for me is a tool. Do it with me is borderline. Think for me would be closer to agency." — Slava

📺 Watch this episode on YouTube. Dima brings up the concept of Directly Responsible Individual (DRI) and he and Slava debate how it differs from RACI, when each approach shines, and what it would take to actually adopt DRI culture on a growing team. One problem with side projects that executives start: even a fixed time commitment may not be sufficient to effectively drive themDirectly Responsible Individual (DRI) — one person with end-to-end accountability and decision-making authority for a project or outcomeRACI — Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, InformedDRI vs RACI: DRI assigns single end-to-end ownership focused on outcomes; RACI assigns responsibility at the task or stage levelDima is not a huge fan of how DRI is portrayed in The GitLab HandbookSlava: are DRI and RACI really that different?Switching to DRI: shift accountability to outcomes, not actions — empower the DRI to determine how to get thereResults chain was discussed in Biweeklycast #52: Needs AnalysisConsent-based (vs consensus-based) committees as an alternative path to fast decisionsThe party planning thought experiment: three DRIs, one shared budget — a case where the model strains"There are so many ways to make people irresponsible." — Slava

📺 Watch this episode on YouTube Dima and Slava build a conceptual triangle to look at a manager’s role and generally do their best to highlight different facets of the job managers are expected to do. Other related episodes On leadership On business processes Definitions PMI: “Management is the process of leading a team to achieve goals within given constraints.” Harvard Business School: “Managers are responsible for setting strategy, executing plans, allocating resources, and leading people to achieve organizational objectives.” Slava’s: “A manager does stuff to achieve things.” Team – Manager – Company triangle Manager as the team–company interface Team is the smallest unit that can carry the culture Manager’s work at different levels of company structure Line manager: team of individual contributors Middle manager: team of managers Executive manager: team of managers of managers Coaching style management, again

📺 Watch this episode on YouTube Dima and Slava have read a book about business processes and discus what it means to follow “process approach”. Book “Unmanageable. What you need to know about business processes?” (in Ukrainian)Processes vs. ProjectsWhat is a good, useful description in a process?From stockpile of policies to process approachBusiness processes interact with organisational structure and cultureOptimisation of business processes is a common demand from Ukrainian businesses

📺 Watch this episode on YouTube. Dima and Slava discuss how management relates to leadership, signs that can point to lack of leadership, and what leadership misses can entail. Management is the process of planning, organizing, and controlling resources to achieve objectives efficiently and predictably.Leadership is the ability to offer compelling vision and inspire, influence, and guide people toward a shared goal.Failure modes of management without leadershipNo value added by a manager at their level on managerial hierarchyManager not having an opinion about team’s role and placeManager not taking responsibility for their decisions and actionsManager acting as an external consultant to the teamCoaching leadership style

📺 Watch this episode on YouTube. Dima and Slava discuss the complexities of estimation in business contexts and the challenges of striking the balance between ambition and realism. Estimation, forecasting, and projectingDesired level of confidence for the estimate makes a differenceShort-term vs long-term estimation50/50 goalsBenchmarking is helpful when you do something novelWorking backwards can help in planning projectsIs your thing really a special snowflake?Illusion of precision, or precision biasRealistic estimated vs ambitious goalsEstimation and benchmarking was also discussed in Biweeklycast #36 How Big Things Get Done.

📺 Watch this episode on YouTube. Dima is doing his best to explore a particular flavour of ambiguity and Slava keeps him in check by sticking to definitions and anchoring the discussion to reality. Ambiguity – the quality of being open to more than one interpretationIs ambiguity merely a lack of proper definitions?Approaches that help in dealing with ambiguityExplicit definition of how success looks likeClear definition of the problem to be solvedValidate hypothesis with real-world inputsAt times, dealing with ambiguity requires a leap of faith

📺 Watch this episode on YouTube Dima and Slava explore Richard P. Rumelt’s book Good Strategy Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters and share insights they took away from the book. https://www.amazon.com/Good-Strategy-Bad-Difference-Matters/dp/0307886239https://www.amazon.com/Strategy-Safari-Through-Strategic-Management/dp/0743270576The Kernel of Strategy: diagnosis, guiding policy, coherent actionsWhat does coherence have to do with policy and strategy?Building on your strength is a great foundation of strategyBad strategy is the result of a leader who’s unwilling or unable to say “No”Cut through that “strategic fluff” with focus on concrete and specific elementsDon’t trust examples from business books. Do your own research6 reflections after reading the bookRating the book: 3 and 5 out of 10The greatest closing quote ever by Dima Malenko: “Think for yourselves!”Check out other bookclub episodes of Biweekly

📺 Watch this episode on YouTube. Dima and Slave talk about what strategy is and what strategy isn’t. From Wikipedia: Strategy is a general plan to achieve one or more long-term or overall goals under conditions of uncertainty.Dima’s characteristics of a strategyMulti-step plan, a “pattern of decisions”Built on a particular world viewAims at global (long-term) maximumDoes not rely on competitors making favourable choicesRequires agency and ability to executeDifferent flavours of strategy: business strategy, product strategy, etcNot every entity needs a strategyVision without execution is a daydream. Execution without vision is a nightmare.

📺 Watch this episode on YouTube. Dima and Slava count priorities and discuss how having to count priorities is a problem in and of itself. Dilution of terminology: priorities, KPIs…“Focus” is a good alternative that is expressly singularPriority: importance vs orderingDoes priority get most time or the best time?One with 10 priority tasks gets to choose what the true top priority isPriority management cultures: collective and individualDoes need for prioritisation arise having a lot more work that one can do?Have a stack of priorities and be very explicit about themLimit number of top priority items that you have at any given time

📺 Watch this episode on YouTube Dima and Slava discuss the end of the second season of Biweeklycast and talk about what to expect in the upcoming third season.