The Box

You can think of the entire product development process, from concept to final testing and documentation, as a black box. The box takes in requirements and produces, via engineering and scientific principles, a product. This box can operate more or less efficiently and more or less reliably. The black box can create a lot of adverse by-products (angry beta users, burnt-out development teams) or useful by-products (well-honed teams, beta customer references, mature processes, and reusable platforms). But these are secondary results and not the true purpose for which the box was put to work.

Every emerging manager works inside the box at first, handling specific tasks and paying little attention to anyone else’s work. But curiosity or ambition or sheer luck occasionally turns the budding manager’s focus to other parts of the environment where unusual things are happening.

Other individuals are doing their own work—not all at the same pace or with the same skill. Other teams are organized differently, and these differences appear to impact how people feel and how well they do their jobs. At first, these are simply mental notes or casual observations. The patterns that define the effectiveness of the box seem to be random and chaotic; as such, they are uninteresting phenomena because they cannot be controlled by technical efforts.
Still, something is following a pattern. Everyone who works for a certain manager seems to be happier than everyone else. Certain products don’t seem to have as many problems as others. People on some teams are well known in the company, while no one has even heard of other teams. Like with any system, more information is needed before the pattern can be discovered. Under tight deadlines and peer pressure to master new technology, the discovery of the management pattern remains a distant curiosity. For some, the need to master the pattern never matures into action. For others, there’s a shortcut: go outside the box.

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