Introducing a Product Delivery Culture at Etsy

Cochran's essay is a case study of Etsy's deliberate effort to rebuild its product delivery culture during a period of stall and recovery. What makes it worth reading is the specificity: concrete practices, concrete leadership moves, concrete outcomes — not an abstract playbook. For product direction it is one of the best recent accounts of how culture is actually changed inside a large organisation, which is to say slowly, through a sequence of small structural interventions that accumulate. Part of Martin Fowler's "Bottlenecks of Scaleups" series, which is worth browsing in full. Use this piece as a counterweight to the abstract strategy literature elsewhere in the library.