Operationalizing unstructured engineering innovation time at Palantir was a huge disaster
Michael Lopp · The human side of world-class engineering leadership | Michael Lopp (Apple, Palantir, Slack) · Jan 25, 2024 · at 15:33
Michael Lopp, veteran engineering executive, discusses his attempt while at Palantir to formalize the 71/29 framework (allocating 29% unallocated 'wolf time' for engineers).
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“I tried to operationalize this at Palantir and it was a huge disaster for most of the reason I kind of disimplied. I gave it a title. I said, this is how you achieve this and this is how we will measure this. And it suddenly became this gameable thing where everyone's like, well, cool. I want to get on the, let's just call it. I didn't call it this. Let's go down the wolf team. Cause I want to be on the wolf team, but that sounds cool. Right. And like, obviously there's status associated with this. Cause this, these people have like 30% of their, 29% of their time to actually go and do other things, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it just became this argument about like, who could be there? How did we measure it? Who was good enough for that? Who wasn't good enough for that? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it just, it collapsed because of that.”
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