4 Principles of tech forward management

We unpack Alan’s assertions & find some surprising tensions

What does two decades of leadership, career changes, getting fired, and pulling yourself up again do to a person? If you’re Alan Brouilette, it makes you a better manager. Alan spoke to us on the CX Pod last time and gave us four principles of management to consider. In this episode, we unpack them to examine their flaws, limitations, and where it’ll be hardest to implement them.

The first principle, "enter with humility," begs the question: at what scale? For Ana, it’s at the individual level: each person who joins and organization or a project comes in new, whether they’re entry level or the CEO.  But those entrants view themselves as heroic interventionists at their own peril: if you believe that you can “save” an organization, there’s a good chance that you’ll win several battles but ultimately lose the war. That’s just what 18F found out, after all. 

 This challenges the Silicon Valley fantasy that technical competence and leadership topcover confers cultural permission. Government bureaucracy, so often derided as change-resistant, actually requires sophisticated stakeholder mapping that most technical interventionists never attempt. Alan's emphasis on understanding existing logic—even bad logic—deserves elaboration. Discovery work means treating internal colleagues as customers, understanding not just what people do but why those behaviors persist.

Principles two and three—hire for people skills over technical prowess, and understand the constraints people work within—generate more productive tension. Aaron sensibly asks: don't you need technical skills to actually build things? Ana's answer reveals hard-won pragmatism that extends Alan's point. Use the oldest, most stable technology that solves the problem. Avoid imposing maintenance burdens your client cannot sustain. If an engineer insists on AI-use when a pivot table suffices, that's a warning sign. Technology debt accumulates whether you acknowledge it or not.

This technical restraint connects directly to understanding larger constraints. Ana pushes further than Alan's original formulation: constraints aren't obstacles to overcome but parameters that define sustainable solutions. Time to hire, budget limitations, geographic requirements, existing skill distributions—these factors should shape technology choices from the start, not be treated as unfortunate complications. The goal isn't building the most impressive system but building one that survives contact with organizational reality.

The final principle, "don't announce with fanfare," is most contentious. Aaron notes that attention is sometimes necessary; Ana counters that marketing should be ongoing, not event-driven. The healthcare.gov disaster (and the DOGE one) haunts this exchange like Banquo's ghost: these are the rare moments when government digital services achieved visibility precisely because catastrophic failure demanded dramatic rescue. Ana advocates soft launches—testing with limited audiences, iterating based on real feedback, expanding gradually. This approach lacks drama but survivability outweighs spectacle.

What made this discussion valuable to us internally is that Alan’s principles resist further simplification. They conflict with what you know will happen in most circumstances: humility battles urgency; technology demands headspinning investment; project launches beg for celebration. 

But building impactful, long-standing solutions requires navigating these tensions, not resolving them fully, which is impossible. The more organizations enter projects with clear eyes about these difficulties, the better. And that counts as progress, however incremental.

What we’re into this week

Scott

I’m not going to lie: when I was young, I was way into technology. I believed all the hype about the internet democratizing everything. How long gone are those illusions! So this week, I’m unrolling my all-time favorite reference in response to you all’s response: Ways of Seeing, the 4-part deep dive into Western art, a critique of its value, and an investigation of how we perceive things. It’s constantly interesting, as we grow, to find that what we thought we had all figured out was actually just one way to look at it, and our way of looking at it might actually have been blocking our continued growth all along. 

Ana

That’s very fair; this pod owes a lot to John Berger. I don’t love meta-analyses in general because they often seem navel-gazey, but this discussion made me go back and re-read Sister Corita Kent’s 10 Rules. The second one includes “General duties of a student: pull everything out of your teacher…” Which is what I’d like to think we were doing here. 

Aaron

Meta-analysis has its place, Ana. Without meta-analysis, almost all datasets would be understudied. If you’re serious about understanding, you have to analyze things using a bunch of different configurations to really mine the data. 

Ana

Very fair point, Aaron. And I appreciate that once again you’ve illustrated your view via baseball statistics lol :) 

Aarn

Np! 

Credits: 

Host: Aaron Meyers
Guest: Ana Monroe
Producer: Ana Monroe
Article: A. Adams
Artwork: Conversation. 1929 Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. Via the National Gallery
Why this artwork: [Abi] Honest conversation, especially within a team, takes so much practice. You’re bad at it at first. So I worked with the team to choose an artwork this week that is straightforward in its title but really loose in its visualization of that title. Kirchner’s work is just called “Conversation”, but the faces are elongated and the perspective is way off. It’s not a perfect, and that’s exactly what it feels like to figure out how to have and to publish these conversations well.