Opening
The board is the job. A chess board has 64 squares and no secrets. Everything is visible. You still lose, because seeing a thing is not the same as understanding it. Teams are like that too. The roadmap is on the wall. The incidents are on the dashboard. Everybody can see the board. Very few people read it.
Beginners move one piece at a time and hope. Good players ask a boring question first: what does every piece want to do? Then they move. I have sat in planning meetings that were all hope and no question. They felt productive. They were not.
Pieces are not people. Roles are. A knight is not a better piece than a bishop. It just moves differently. A knight jumps over things. It sees corners nobody else sees. It is also useless in a long open line. I have worked with knights. Brilliant in a messy, crowded position. Bored to death on a clean, straight project. Put them where they can jump.
| Piece | Moves like | On a team | What it needs |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pawn | One step, never back | The person who ships small things every day | A clear file ahead |
| Knight | L shapes, over walls | The generalist who connects odd dots | A crowded board |
| Bishop | Long diagonals | The specialist with one deep, sharp line | Open space |
| Rook | Straight and far | The operator who owns the boring, vital parts | An open file |
| Queen | Everything | The rare person who can do it all, and burns out | Rest, honestly |
The featured column in the table is “What it needs”. That column is the job of a lead.
Middlegame
Tempo beats talent. In chess, a tempo is one move. Waste one and your opponent gets a free turn. Teams waste tempo in meetings about meetings, in tickets that bounce between three queues, in “quick syncs” that are neither. When I reshaped teams into product cells, the point was tempo. One team owns the thing end to end, so nobody waits for anybody. Incident resolution dropped by 42%. Nobody got smarter. We just stopped giving the other side free moves.1
Trade when you are ahead. A strong player simplifies when winning. Fewer pieces, fewer surprises. A strong team does the same. Delete the feature nobody uses. Kill the service with one caller. Every piece on the board is something that can be attacked at 3am.
Pawns are the soul of chess. A grandmaster said that a long time ago, and he was right.2 Pawns cannot move backwards. Every pawn move is a promise. On a team, the pawns are the small, steady commitments: the test you wrote, the doc you updated, the handover you did properly. Nobody claps for them. They decide the endgame anyway.
Endgame
The king finally walks. In the opening, the king hides in the corner. In the endgame, the king becomes a fighting piece and walks up the board. Leads are the same. Early on, protect the team from noise. Late in a project, get out of the corner and push. A king that hides forever loses on time.
Promotion is real. A pawn that crosses the whole board becomes a queen. Not because it was secretly a queen all along. Because it kept going, one square at a time, and the board rewarded it. The best people I have worked with were pawns who did not stop.
Resign gracefully. Analyse forever. Chess players shake hands, then sit down and replay the game to see where it turned. That is a postmortem with better manners. I teach and learn constantly, and the review is where most of the learning lives. The loss is just the price of the lesson.3
That is the whole essay. Teams are chess sets. Read the board, respect the pawns, and do not let the queen burn out. Also, let the king walk.
Related: if you want the version with YAML and a pager, read The org chart fixed our incidents. It has fewer horses.
Footnotes
- 1
The 42% is real. The tempo metaphor is mine. I am very proud of it.
- 2
Philidor, 1749. He also played chess blindfolded in public, which is the most 1700s flex there is.
- 3
This is also how I justify losing at chess to my own app.
