WEW20 - Where Open-Source Goes to Die and How To Scope Management Roles

It’s issue 20. It’s also time for a pivot, you may not notice a huge change, but in terms of marketing and growth, WEW will begin centering around strategies for adopting and adapting to emerging technology. This is still a broad topic, but it all falls under the umbrella of helping you leverage change for growth in your businesses and careers.

As a reminder, I offer consulting services. If you are looking to leverage an emerging technology or process, reduce cloud costs, revamp your tech strategy, or more, I’m here to help. You can learn more about what I offer at https://williamanderson.io.

While this newsletter is free, I put a lot of work into it. Because of that, I offer a paid tier with additional insights and resources to help keep it going. When you see ❖, know that denotes paid content. You can subscribe here, or if you aren’t ready to commit, just buy me a coffee.

In this week’s Email:

✧ Artificial Intelligence - Alibaba, Bloomberg, and more go conversational
✧ Open-source - What happens to an open-source repo when it dies?
✧ Management Tips - The $$$$ value of culture
✧ Further Reading - Books and Articles I recommend this week
❖ Talent Management - How to scope management roles
❖ Blogposts - Access to full-length blog posts without the paywall

Artificial Intelligence

Alibaba, Bloomberg, and more go conversational

BloombergGPT, a special LLM trained by Bloomberg specifically around finance is making headlines. Alibaba also just unveiled its answer to ChatGPT. Google has Bard. Bing has its hat in the ring, and leaks for source code and open-source projects are letting even small companies host their own advanced conversational AI.

Out of the companies above, I believe most of them are doing the right thing by getting involved and grabbing some market share. Bloomberg however has its mind in the right place more so than the others. While general-purpose and search-integrated chat interfaces are going to become commonplace, the largest revenue opportunity for many companies is going to be finding ways to package and sell their services through conversational interfaces that give access to high-value proprietary data.

If you run a company and are thinking of building your own instead of just integrating an API off the shelf, I wouldn’t recommend it unless you bring a lot of very exclusive content and value to the table.

Open-source

What happens to an open-source repo when it dies?

Using open source can be surprisingly expensive. I’ve been in multiple organizations that in the past decided to use an open-source piece of software for a critical part of the business. In one instance it worked great for three years until the maintainer of the repository stopped maintaining it.

It was taken over by others, but they soon walked away and eventually, we took it on. It required pretty regular adapting and maintenance to keep this tool relevant, and updating it was much more work than any of our in-house packages. Even if you abandoned it and forked our private version, the codebase was so off from our style guide, it would stick out like a weed in the garden that was our corporate Github account.

Eventually, we build our replacement, not even as a module, but just inside our monolith for the service we used it with. The original repo that we loved still existed lingering, rotting in the wild.

Without proper succession and community planning even a great tool can die when its core maintainers need to walk away.

Management Tips

The $$$$ value of culture

In my recent coaching and blog post, I have focused on the importance of aligning mission, vision, and values to create a culture that drives value creation. While a company's primary objective is to fulfill its mission and not solely focus on employee welfare, a supportive and positive work environment is crucial for success.

To measure the impact of company culture:

1. Use employee surveys to gauge cultural alignment with values and mission, and understand employees' feelings.

2. Track KPIs for both business and culture, correlating perceptions to outcomes such as revenue growth, customer satisfaction, and market share.

3. Continuously refine your culture based on feedback, market changes, and performance, always prioritizing the mission. Regularly review and update company values to maintain competitiveness and adaptability.

Your company’s values serve the mission.

Further Reading

Books

Book Yourself Solid - Book Yourself Solid is ultimately a book for consultants but between the lines, it’s a book for anyone ambitious. The title isn’t about having no time left in your calendar, but about attracting so many people who want to work with you that you are turning away more clients than you accept. I’m still in the process of reading it, so it may pop up in this section again, but I’ve enjoyed the earlier chapters about how you need to be an expert before you build yourself as a known expert. Both of which greatly matter. The simplest point I’ve been inspired by is that whatever you claim to be an expert in, you should read at least one book on that monthly. I’m going to lean into this with my reading selections, so be prepared to get more O’Reilly publications on cloud and cost mentioned here.

Blogs

• How I Gained 15 Pounds of Muscle with ChatGPT

• How To Tell If An NFT Is Real: A Quick Guide For Savvy Collectors

❖ Full Access Blogposts, Worksheets, and Paid Content ❖

Subscribe to Stegosaur to read the rest.