{"id":18320,"date":"2013-06-06T01:31:28","date_gmt":"2013-06-05T23:31:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/?p=18320"},"modified":"2013-06-06T01:31:28","modified_gmt":"2013-06-05T23:31:28","slug":"scaling-teams-and-the-fight-against-human-nature","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/2013\/06\/06\/scaling-teams-and-the-fight-against-human-nature\/","title":{"rendered":"Scaling Teams and the Fight Against Human Nature"},"content":{"rendered":"<!-- google_ad_section_start -->\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/moz.com\/rand\/scaling-teams-fight-against-human-nature\/\">Scaling Teams and the Fight Against Human Nature<\/a><\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Human nature dictates that we:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Form tribes to build identity and camraderie<\/strong>\u00a0\u2013 yet in a scaling startup, this causes untenable, painful, progress-stopping inter-team rivalries.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Invent a common enemy upon which we can heap blame and against which we can fight<\/strong>\u00a0\u2013 sadly, inside the tribes that naturally form, there\u2019s often a tendency to create that common enemy internally (it could be marketing vs. engineering or testing vs. production or sales vs. execs, or any number of others).<\/li>\n<li><strong>Minimize the positives and focus on the negatives<\/strong>\u00a0\u2013 that could be feedback from customers, internal critiques, manager reviews, product imperfections, or weaknesses in process. It\u2019s so easy to forget that we somehow beat the formidable odds against building something that worked, something that attracted customers, something that scaled, and a company where hundreds of people really do want to work.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Resist change at all costs<\/strong>\u00a0\u2013 yet in a scaling startup, change is the only constant, and processes, procedures, formats, teams, and everything else has to change to be successful.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Act emotionally, yet believe our decisions to be driven solely by logic<\/strong>\u00a0&#8211; we tell ourselves we act rationally, but can easily prove that irrational biases rule our minds. This wouldn\u2019t be nearly as dangerous if we could recognize these biases, but in another failing of human nature, we cannot \u2013 we cling to the notion that our decisions, unlike the rest of our species, are uniquely logical.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Lose empathy as our numbers grow<\/strong>\u00a0\u2013 tragically, when we need empathy the most (as an organization gets bigger and there are more people to consider and more complexities between them), our nature is to rescind it. It\u2019s easy to empathize with a small group you see everyday, but much harder to extend that empathy to everyone in a larger group (especially those you may not know well).<\/li>\n<li><strong>Create rules and process to prevent against repeats of singular abuses<\/strong>\u00a0\u2013 the old adage of one bad apple ruining the whole bunch becomes more and more likely the larger a startup grows. Process can be wonderful, but sometimes we create a process just to ward against some bad behavior from a former employeee and, by doing so, ruin the company a little more for everyone. Use process to free and enable, not to punish and restrict.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Irrationally romanticize the past<\/strong>\u00a0\u2013 \u201cRemember how things used to be? It was so much better three years ago when I first started here and\u2026\u201d -everyone at any organization, ever. But I remember three years ago. It sucked compared to today. Our ability to delight customers paled in comparison. Our ability to attract talent was in the toilet. Fear about our budget and our bottom line was a daily occurrence. 2013 is superior in so many ways and I know it, but even still find myself fondly remembering (or, rather, misremembering) back in 2010 when (in my human-addled mind) it all seemed so much easier.<\/li>\n<li><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/blockquote>\n<!-- google_ad_section_end -->\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<!-- google_ad_section_start -->\n<p>Scaling Teams and the Fight Against Human Nature Human nature dictates that we: Form tribes to build identity and camraderie\u00a0\u2013 yet in a scaling startup, this causes untenable, painful, progress-stopping inter-team rivalries. Invent a common enemy upon which we can heap blame and against which we can fight\u00a0\u2013 sadly, inside the tribes that naturally form, &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/2013\/06\/06\/scaling-teams-and-the-fight-against-human-nature\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Scaling Teams and the Fight Against Human Nature<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n<!-- google_ad_section_end -->\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"link","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[1,62],"tags":[580,1146,1224],"keyring_services":[],"class_list":["post-18320","post","type-post","status-publish","format-link","hentry","category-general","category-technology","tag-management","tag-psychology","tag-startups","post_format-post-format-link"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":28507,"url":"https:\/\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/2018\/04\/20\/distributed-architecture-concepts-i-learned-while-building-a-large-payments-system\/","url_meta":{"origin":18320,"position":0},"title":"Distributed architecture concepts I learned while building a large payments system","author":"Leonid Mamchenkov","date":"April 20, 2018","format":false,"excerpt":"Gergely Orosz, an engineer who worked at Uber on the large scale payments system used by the company, shares some of the distributed architecture concepts he had to learn in the blog post titled \"Distributed architecture concepts I learned while building a large payments system\". The article is very well\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;All&quot;","block_context":{"text":"All","link":"https:\/\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/category\/general\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":21542,"url":"https:\/\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/2014\/04\/13\/scaling-the-facebook-data-warehouse-to-300-pb\/","url_meta":{"origin":18320,"position":1},"title":"Scaling the Facebook data warehouse to 300 PB","author":"Leonid Mamchenkov","date":"April 13, 2014","format":"link","excerpt":"Scaling the Facebook data warehouse to 300 PB At Facebook, we have unique storage scalability challenges when it comes to our data warehouse. Our warehouse stores upwards of 300 PB of Hive data, with an incoming daily rate of about 600 TB. In the last year, the warehouse has seen\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;All&quot;","block_context":{"text":"All","link":"https:\/\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/category\/general\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":28223,"url":"https:\/\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/2017\/11\/14\/amazon-aws-scaling-up-to-your-first-10-million-users\/","url_meta":{"origin":18320,"position":2},"title":"Amazon AWS : Scaling Up to Your First 10 Million Users","author":"Leonid Mamchenkov","date":"November 14, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"https:\/\/www.slideshare.net\/AmazonWebServices\/ent309-scaling-up-to-your-first-10-million-users-78927643 This must be one of the greatest presentations on the Amazon AWS that I've ever seen.\u00a0 It uses a gradual approach - from small and simple to huge and complex.\u00a0 It covers a whole lot of different Amazon AWS services, how they compliment each other, at which stage and\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;All&quot;","block_context":{"text":"All","link":"https:\/\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/category\/general\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":27314,"url":"https:\/\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/2017\/02\/09\/mcrouter-a-memcached-protocol-router\/","url_meta":{"origin":18320,"position":3},"title":"Mcrouter: a memcached protocol router","author":"Leonid Mamchenkov","date":"February 9, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"Mcrouter is an Open Source tool developed by Facebook for scaling up the memcached deployments: Mcrouter is a memcached protocol router for scaling memcached (http:\/\/memcached.org\/) deployments. 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Here is\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;All&quot;","block_context":{"text":"All","link":"https:\/\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/category\/general\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/02\/mcrouter-500x375.png?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":25090,"url":"https:\/\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/2015\/12\/28\/5-aws-mistakes-you-should-avoid\/","url_meta":{"origin":18320,"position":4},"title":"5 AWS mistakes you should avoid","author":"Leonid Mamchenkov","date":"December 28, 2015","format":false,"excerpt":"\"5 AWS mistakes you should avoid\" is a rather opinionated piece on what you should and shouldn't do with your infrastructure, especially, when using AWS. \u00a0Here's an example: A typical web application consists of at least: load balancer scalable web backend database and looks like the following figure. 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