Design the Highway, Not the Traffic
From Traffic Cops to Highway Engineers
This week’s throughline: teams move fastest when the system makes the right work obvious and easy. Let’s dive in:
1) Stop Directing Traffic—Design the Highway
Most “management” makes work harder; be the highway engineer, not the traffic cop. If a step in your process doesn’t increase safety or speed, remove it.
2) APIs Are Developer UX
Great APIs shape how engineers think, making the right thing easy and the wrong thing hard. Measure cognitive ergonomics with a simple test: can a new dev complete a common task without assistance?
3) Job → Career → Calling
Coders ship features (job), system builders shape interfaces and SLOs (career), and problem‑solvers move human outcomes (calling). Your role is to honor each stage and create paths between them. Tie work to a customer metric so meaning compiles.
4) Hire Cathedral Builders—With Judgment
Interview for craft, systems, and impact: a PR they’re proud of, an SLO they’ve improved, a customer metric that moved.
5) Focus Is an Architecture, Not a Trait
Deep work is a repeated decision, enabled by environment. As a quick experiment, institute two daily 2‑hour maker blocks and feel the difference. Stop performing productivity. Design attention so meaningful output is the default.
6) Mentorship Builds Antifragile Minds
Your legacy is resilient developers, not clever commits. Coach with questions, not answers, and escalate from “ask → nudge → nothing” to grow judgment. Measure mentorship by reduced rescue pings, not meeting hours.
This Week’s Core Message
Design for flow, not control: when outcomes are crisp and paths are frictionless, smart teams ship without supervision.
Actionable Experiments to Try This Week
Remove one approval and publish a one‑page “How to deploy” runbook. Pin a one‑line outcome description on every PR.
Think through the Job→Career→Calling stages and have each engineer pick one action to progress a stage.
Create daily maker blocks (2×2h, no meetings)