Recommended Reading

As a product manager, The Mole often needs to make decisions. Sometimes the evidence is unambiguous and the conclusion undebatable. Far more often, the evidence is dodgy and the risk of cognitive biases degrading the quality of the decision is very real. The literature on cognitive biases is rich -- The Mole heartily recommends hanging a copy of the Cognitive Bias Codex that Design Hacks created based on Buster Benson's cheat sheet where you cannot ignore it -- but there's a paucity of information about how to cope.

Not surprisingly, at least in retrospect, some people involved in big life-or-death decisions have worked to fill the gap. The Mole is referring to the folks who assess whether or not the preponderance of evidence points towards unleashing the power of America's armamentarium: the CIA's intelligence analysts. Richards J. Heuer crafted a system called "Analysis of Competing Hypotheses" that rotates one's thinking ninety degrees and drains out a lot of opportunity for bias. As with many things paid for with taxpayer dollars, it is available for free download from the CIA. There's also an inexpensive commercial print-on-demand version from Globalytica.

Product managers were not the intended audience, so The Mole suggests that when reading it you have a regex parser running continuously in your head, making substitutions like these:

• intelligence analyst --> product manager
• intelligence analysis --> product management
• analytical process --> product management process
• analytical products --> requirements documents
• intelligence consumers --> software engineers
• policymakers --> executives
• foreign leaders --> users
• foreign governments --> customers

After many years in the academy, on both sides of the blackboard, the Mole made the leap into the so-called real world, i.e., for-profit corporate employment. Many of the Mole's cherished preconceptions were quickly tossed aside; some were more easily replaced than others. This article helped to explain the massive gulf between everything the Mole had ever learned or taught about how to program and the state of the legacy systems he had on his hands.

This is an essay that the Mole rereads fairly regularly. The experience is always unnerving: some parts are obviously right, some are obviously wrong, but which category any particular part falls into is seldom the same from one reading to the next. Regardless of which side of the debate you choose (or, if you are like the Mole, both and neither) the issues are well worth considering.

Richard Gabriel seems to be an example of a very particular type, the frustrated LISPer. The Mole finds the type quite fascinating: they're very smart, quite provocative, absolutely fascinating, and just faintly askew. Other notable examples include Paul Graham and Peter Seibel.

If you have anything at all to do with software development projects and haven't read this one you should be very, very embarassed.

Before there was Peopleware, there was The Psychology of Computer Programming. Nothing ages perfectly, but only the small-minded will focus on the thoughts that betray their age and miss the overall insightfulness of this book.