Teams
An annotated collection of 6 books, papers & essays on teams, spanning 2008 to 2023. Featuring works by James O. Coplien, Phil Jackson & Hugh Delehanty, Stanley McChrystal and 3 more — each with editorial commentary oriented to digital product practice.
Organizational Patterns of Agile Software Development
Coplien's work on organisational patterns predates most of the agile movement and is in many ways deeper than the movement it foreshadowed. The piece collects patterns observed in high-performing software organisations —…
Eleven Rings: The Soul of Success
Phil Jackson won eleven NBA championships as a coach — six with the Bulls, five with the Lakers — and the book is his account of how to lead teams of extreme talent and extreme ego. Jackson's method blended triangle-offe…
Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World
McChrystal commanded US special operations in Iraq and the book is his account of discovering that his enemy — decentralised, networked, fast — was organised for the problem his traditional hierarchy was not. The solutio…
Extreme Teams: Why Pixar, Netflix, Airbnb, and Other Cutting-Edge Companies Succeed Where Most Fail
Shaw studies seven companies he calls "extreme teams" — Pixar, Netflix, Airbnb, Whole Foods, Alibaba, Zappos, Patagonia — and extracts the patterns he sees in how they operate. The book is a survey rather than a deep cas…
What Makes a Strong Product Culture?
Norton's essay on product culture is a compressed argument about what distinguishes strong product organisations from the rest — not the rituals or the frameworks, but the shared sense of what good product work looks lik…
The Radiating Programmer
Manrubia describes a type of engineer who works in the open — sharing context as they go, not in reports but in the texture of how they think aloud. The essay is short and deceptively simple: it names a behaviour that sm…