Mediocrity vs Greatness in Complex Systems

It is 12:27AM and I didn’t write anything today. Better late than never.

These days I am thinking about complex systems. I am interested the most in what makes some teams, companies, or countries produce mediocre vs great results.

I am starting more and more to believe that the structure of the system matters more than the inputs. As long as the people pass a minimum qualifications threshold, their outcome is highly dependent on the structure they are in.

The problem is it is easy in retrospect to understand what made a system work or not work. It is hard to deliberately design a complex system in a way that makes it produce great results. You kinda need to control its evolution without intervening too much.

I think we will never find the answer to the why question. But the thing to keep in mind is that structures matter, and the outcomes are based on them.

Email reactions

Today I replied to an email with a thumbs up emoji. I just wanted to tell the sender that I got his message.

I am sure this use case happens multiple times a day. I want to tell someone that I noted their message (or love it, hate it…etc).

It would be cool if Gmail supports reacting to emails. Almost 100% of my daily emails come from coworkers who are also on Google suite.

The biggest challenge for this feature is 3rd party mail clients. Google can’t support this feature on there.

But they can at least add one click reaction icons. When the user clicks one of them like a thumbs up, it replies to the sender with an email with a thumbs up inside. Single click, works everywhere.

Corporate Life

While adding tags to my posts I tagged some of them with “Corporate Life“.

Having worked in both startups and big companies made me realize there are different rules between both. It is hard to build a mental model of working in startups since normally they are chaotic and each story is different. But I can argue with big companies there are similar patterns that hold true to some extent across all of them.

It takes time to build the mental model of the corporate world. I notice it the most with friends who move from small companies to large corporations. At the beginning they are shocked and don’t understand the world around them.

There is the time dimension. Things take a minimum of a week and up to years in the corporate world. When people move from smaller faster environments they are shocked at how the people around them are slow.

There is the motivation. In a small company one is connected to their peers including the company founders. In a big company the culture leans more on the mercenary side and the incentives are different. You can think of it as more exploitation less exploration.

Then there are the different corporate personalities and what I call “game of thrones”. There are typical corporate profiles that behave in a certain way, and there are certain situations where the moves are as obvious as the opening of a grand master chess game. A good introduction to those personalities can be found in books like The Phoenix Project. I don’t know a good book on the “game of thrones”. My corporate expert recommends Robert Greene books (So evil, I know).

I am not the best corporate player. I am good at understanding what’s happening around me, but I am not good at reacting properly. Part of it is laziness, part is lack of discipline, and part fear.

I have friends who are corporate stars. One of them is unstoppable. I call him to consult whenever I am in a situation and don’t know what to do. Although he is young, he had the talent from day one. He is my go to person for all things corporate life.

Finally I try to not put disclaimers at everything I say to avoid it being misinterpreted, but for this post I have to. I am not writing this to say corporates are bad. I am a big believer in capital markets and building big great companies. I am just saying big companies are a different breed and have different rules of play. And if you want to be successful, you have to know the rules and play by them. The good news is there are well known patterns. You just need to find them out, and get a mentor who helps you through. Good luck!

Tags

I didn’t use to tag the posts I publish on this blog. I recently decided to start using tags. Yesterday I went and tagged the most recent 60 posts I published.

There are multiple benefits to tags 1) They give me visibility on different topics I write about. 2) They make my posts about a certain topic accessible to new visitors of the blog (you can also follow my posts about a specific topic by going to the tag link/rss). 3) They might have SEO benefit, however I am not sure about it.

I also went and added a tags cloud on the right section of the blog (you will have to scroll to the very end to see it on mobile). My top tags so far are Product, Product Management, Thoughts, Product Analysis, and Books.

I am yet to clean my navigation bar and improve my search, but my plan is to have a tags page and move the tags cloud there. Until then they will stay on the right section of the blog.

Skin in the game

I finally finished the book. At the beginning I didn’t like it and abandoned it for a while. Then I saw Naval saying it is the best book he read in 2018. I decided to pick it up again.

I got the idea of skin in the game. The idea of bearing the consequences of both the upside and downside of one’s decisions.

I got how beareaucrats and economists have no skin in the game, since they don’t get the downside of their decisions.

The minority rule was a revelation. I think it is a must understand for anyone to know how the world works.

I didn’t fully understand ergodicity. And I think Lindy effect is similar to Bayes forecasts in the case of initial priors where one predicts something is going to continue for at least the same duration it has survived so far. I don’t know why he decided to call it Lindy effect.

Dynamic and static equality was a spot on. I don’t know how accurate is the data he presented but it confirms my bias on why the so called “economic equality” in Europe does more harm than good.

The idea of complex systems was also a spot on. I was talking to a friend the other day and he was saying I don’t know why when I talk to each of them they are smart, but when they are in a team the output is really bad. I was also talking to a different friend about marriage, and she highlighted how two sane persons become crazy once they are together. This all falls into the idea that the outcome of the parts together doesn’t equal the sum of the parts. Because with every node you add, the complexity grows exponentially and you have a totally new thing. At the end the structure of the system matters more than the inputs/parts.

Then there is the idea of ruin. While I totally got it I didn’t understand how you avoid making it stop you from taking risks. At the end of the day we need some belief to take the big risks that result in big outcomes. Taking small risks with high outcomes at extremistan only works for a small subset of people. Or maybe one can argue that the whole product/market validation methods in software startups are only to take small risks and avoid ruin. I don’t know.

The biggest challenge for me was connecting the dots in the book. While the book talks about the same topic all across, the flow seemed broken and the different parts seemed disconnected. I understood the different subparts with different degrees but overall failed to connect the overall flow. Maybe there isn’t one.

There is also the style of the author. It is aggressive and he almost attacks every one he disagrees with. Most specially Saudi Arabia. It got to a point where it became comical every time I read one of those sentences where he attacks one of his opponents. I laughed out loud reading some of them.

And I wasn’t fully convinced by some of the arguments related to lack of skin in the game. There were multiple points where Nassim abstracted a fairly complex topic in a simple manner similar to those he was attacking throughout the book (e.g. the Arab-Israeli conflict).

In general I enjoyed it and it was worth reading. I recommend you doing so as well.

Product Management Modes

In the Arabic podcast I appeared on with Mohamed Sherif, he asked me an interesting question about the difference between doing conversion optimization features at Booking.com and building infrastructure products at Zalando.

I think there are different modes of operation when one is doing product management.

One dimension is the nature of the product. A consumer facing product involves lots of data analysis, user research, testing, release and iterations. An internal product requires lots of stakeholder management, understanding of business constraints, and lots of communication. It also has a personal feedback cycle, as whenever you screw up in an internal product the users come straight to your desk.

Another dimension that’s more generic regardless of the nature of the product is planning and execution modes. Think of a lion that’s picking a cattle from a herd. It keeps observing the herd to pick which one is the best opportunity. Then comes execution where the lion starts running until it achieves its goal (sorry vegans, c’est la vie).

The same applies in product. There is a mode where you observe, collect, brainstorm, think, and talk. Then there is the mode where the team executes and you work with them to eliminate any barriers to success.

Your influence in each mode depends on multiple factors. For example if you work with an inexperienced team, you will have to interfere a lot in the execution mode to make sure the team is working on the right things. If you are in a customer obsessed/centric culture, you will spend less effort having to convince the team why something is necessary during the planning mode.

Understanding the factors that influence your work and which of them you can influence by how much is crucial to become successful at what you do.

Blog monetization

I frequently get the questions why I’m not monetizing my blog, if I have plans for it, and if someone wants to make money from blogging what should they do.

I am not an expert in making money from blogging. I am not placing ads on this blog and not planning to. This blog is a space I own (I want to emphasize “i own” as it is not controlled by the social media or the blogging platforms overlords) that allows me to connect to the world and interact with people. It is not for commercial purpose and not planning to be. That’s why I don’t care about the number of readers, and I don’t do more of the things I can do to increase readership such as blogging about the same topic regularly or polish things more to invite you to share posts and subscribe to the newsletter.

If you want to make money blogging you should do different things from what I do. Here I talk about everything. Technology, philosophy, travel, and more. This makes this blog too personal, which means the regular audience read it because of myself. Sometimes I write good pieces that spread beyond the regular audience and introduce new people to my ideas. But most of the time this isn’t the case.

To make money from blogging you need to build a big audience. It is much harder to build such audience if you write about everything. You need to specialize. Pick an area and write about it. Then you have to be consistent and publish regularly. Over time, your blog will have gravity from the audience interested in the topic, and if you are consistent, you will become more visible. That’s when you can start monetizing. But it is not easy, and needs a lot of patience.

Linking

When I was working for booking.com I asked why we are not linking certain parts of the website. The answer I got was that we already experimented and it leads to dropping conversion, as users get distracted and drop out of the funnel.

My current manager links everything. In every document there are links to every other mentioned document. It is like an internal company wide web. At the beginning I was so annoyed by it. Especially when he asked me why something isn’t linked. I later realized it is a good habit and saves a lot of time wasted searching for the right document[1].

In my yesterday’s blog post[2], I didn’t link text to web pages I am referencing to not distract the reader. I put them at the end as footnotes.

I think important work emails should be treated the same. Linking too much in important communication distracts the readers and leads to less people getting the message. Also having too many links dilutes the value of links (if you have 20 links in a single email probably none of them will get clicked).

Unfortunately in big companies people optimize for being correct over being persuasive. This leads to overlinking. Persuasive communication requires less details. Correct communication is boring. Having a good balance is the key. And it is hard.

[1] Actually Google drive search is the only Google product where “Search” doesn’t work. You write the exact document name and it autocompletes something else.

[2] http://mostafanageeb.com/2018/10/12/the-most-tolerant-loses/

The most tolerant loses

I am still reading “Skin in the game” by Nassim Talib. I was bored in the middle and switched to “12 rules for life” by Peterson. I am now taking a break from it and went back to Talib.

One of the chapters I really like is “The Most Intolerant Wins: The Dictatorship of the Small Minority” [1]. I read it before buying the book as Nassim published it on Medium. It explains what leads something dictated by a small minority in a society to become the norm of the majority. For example why most food in US is kosher, and why most food in Europe is becoming Halal. Even though both Jews and Muslims are minorities in both societies.

The tl;dr is that there are certain conditions need to be met for something dictated by a minority to become the norm of the majority.

  1. They need to be really intolerant: they won’t go to a party unless it has Halal/Kosher food. They won’t go to a restaurant if it has no wheelchair accessible bathroom. They won’t go to a meeting unless everyone speaks English.
  2. They need to be spread out: If it is a minority concentrated in some area, the rule won’t spread. The minority needs to be spread out across society so that in every sub group, there is at least one person representing the intolerant minority.
  3. There has to be an asymmetric relationship: Halal eaters can’t eat non-Halal, but non-Halal eaters can eat Halal. German speakers can speak English, but non-German speakers can’t speak German.
  4. The switching cost must be small: The cost of making food Halal doesn’t increase its price. Switching to English in a meeting isn’t a big effort for most people.

I am now thinking about myself. As a minority in a society (wheelchair users), my intolerance isn’t as high as sometimes people expect from me.

It is both good and bad. It is good because it gives me a piece of mind since I have low expectations. It is bad because I sometimes give up my own rights for my peace of mind, and sometimes I feel it is bad because as someone who can influence and change things making them better for others many times I don’t do that for the same reason of having peace of mind. It is what Essam[2] keeps nagging me about as my “moral responsibility”.

The reason I am writing all this is because the neighbors in my apartment complex are signing a petition asking the owners to install a gate at the entrance to prevent the repeated thefts that are happening from time to time.

I voiced my objection to the gate since my building’s door is directly on the street, and if I need to throw the trash away I have to get into the complex to what the Germans call “Müllraum” (waste room). The room already have a heavy door to the level that I just open it a little and throw the trash inside without putting it in the right bin. If I get inside and the door closes I will be locked inside or will have to fracture my shoulder to be able to open the door. Adding a gate will just force me into opening two heavy doors instead of one, and it won’t prevent thefts because all doors of the buildings on the street can lead to the inside of the complex and the garage. There are still more entry points that a gate will just make my life harder and won’t stop those motivated thieves.

I voiced my concerns and they decided to go with the petition anyway due to the rule of the majority. I am now thinking of whether I should do a counter-petition and side with the owning company that gates won’t prevent thefts and will strip me from my right to throw my own garbage (which they will love as they won’t want to pay for the installation of gates). I can also send them an official letter in German showing them how easily my bones get fractured and making them accountable for any problems that may arise as a result of installing this gate. Such a letter will make them so confused that they will think a 100 times before installing it.

There is also the hypocritical option of claiming that the building is pretty safe and those thefts are resulting from people’s complacence in protecting their belongings (which the owning company will also like). This is the beauty and curse of the post facts era we live in.

As you can see it is a typical situation of how intolerant one should be. Unfortunately the minority rule doesn’t apply to most situations related to wheelchair accessibility because conditions #2 and #4 don’t apply to most societies. There aren’t many wheelchair users spread out in every group of people (maybe it will be the case in Europe in 50 years when the median age keeps going up and as a result the % of wheelchair bound people), and the cost of making something wheelchair accessible is sometimes too high to justify the value (see my tweets above).

I am still making up my mind and didn’t decide what to do.

[1] https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dictatorship-of-the-small-minority-3f1f83ce4e15

[2] https://twitter.com/neo_458

Short random thoughts

I am unable to think about topics to write about. It is not writer block but rather a result of sleep debt from last week. I can’t wait for the weekend to sleep well.

I am recently debating universal basic income with friends. I am a believer it doesn’t make sense and will just lead to higher inflation. My friends believe it works and if there are the right mechanisms, there should be competition between businesses to attract customers money, leading to cheaper prices. I was also surprised it was going to happen in the US in the 70s but they didn’t proceed with the idea. Happy to discuss any thoughts you have.

I am still on twitter and LinkedIn break. I won’t open any of them till the end of the month. I am having withdrawal effects, but I am holding tight.

I want to make my writing habit consistent in timing. I want to start my day writing something. The problem is being a night owl makes me always wake up late for work. And I can’t force myself to wake up earlier for the sake of writing.

I am currently spreading my vocal advocacy for night owls and how the modern work schedule doesn’t fit them. I discovered many people don’t know it is mainly genetic, and they can’t do much about it. It now makes other owls feel less guilty about themselves when I tell them about the genetic fact. I am feeling like Rick when he said “I am a pickle”. I keep telling people “I am an owl“. #teamOwls

I am also thinking about detachment. I noticed I am becoming defensive in some meetings recently. This stems from being with the same team for almost a year, and taking pride in the work we do. There is a fine line between defending the work being done and thinking of what needs to be improved. The problem is after a while we become part of the system. We let the waves move us in their direction. We should keep an open mind, and instead of going with the flow or resisting, we should surf to rise high above those challenges and arrive safely to our goals.

I have two long form posts that I never finished. One is about stakeholder management. I recently wrote a paper on how we manage stakeholders in our department that went viral inside the company. It is too specific that makes it useless to be published publicly as is. I have a draft for the public one, but it needs half a day to finish. The second post is about writing the developers newsletter inside the company. I took this task from a colleague that went on parental leave, and I didn’t imagine I would enjoy it that much (it is ironic the extrovert, talkative, vocal guy didn’t think he would enjoy writing a monthly newsletter to 200+ teams). I experimented some ideas, and wanted to share this experience. I hope I will get to publishing both of them.