Name-dropping for great success!
Like in any other profession, conversations involving technical leadership, advisors, consultants, and other proximate stakeholders have some commonly addressed concepts that get compressed into idioms and symbols. These are frequently acronyms and initialisms, sometimes buzzwords, and occasionally named laws.
Yes, namedropping these will make you sound like you’re either actually smart or trying to sound that way, and so there’s a bit of a bullshit hazard in their use–but there is value here. The concepts they represent are genuinely useful and worth remembering.
Here’s the few I’ve actually retained and referenced over the years:
- Conway’s Law: Over time, your org’s communication shape == your system architecture shape (so best be deliberate about both)
- A mistake I’ve made that you should avoid: confusing this with Godwin’s Law. Don’t do that.
- Brooks’ Law: adding people to a late project will make it take even longer.
- Goodhart’s Law: when a measure or a metric becomes a target, its usefulness as a measure or a metric is ruined. (h/t Spencer Norman for this one)
- Parkinson’s Law: people have exceptionally strong opinions about concepts that are easy to understand; that does not make them important
- Effective leaders are able to discern between normal statements of departmentally-biased importance and the slightly fear-inflected urgency of someone describing an exceptional problem
