Follow the Money

Why do great engineers and team leads stumble when scaling up? Why do thriving businesses fumble large-scale technical transformations? At its core, a business is a way of managing how money enters, circulates, and leaves an organization. Yet most software engineers stick to code and architecture, overlooking the financial and organizational structures that underpin their work. This book looks at technical delivery using the lens of "money flows." Building on Conway's law, which states that organizations' products tend to reflect their own communication structures, Follow the Money argues that those communication structures are themselves molded by money flows. Understanding how money actually moves in your organization will give you the knowledge to revamp ineffective financial structures to fix the organizational problems that are holding you back. Use systems thinking to tease out the significant feedback loops in your organization Explain the core key financial concepts every technical leader needs to succeed Identify (and correct) funding patterns that stifle innovation or encourage technical debt Apply an easy-to-use framework to analyze your organization from customer (or "patron,") down to lines of code Learn the mysterious arts of aligning financial strategy with your technical delivery