Makers Tools vs. Managers Tools: Who's Winning?
When both specialized work and collab happen speedily and losslessly within these apps, for a Maker to go to Slack, email and/or Jira becomes a channel of last resort.
But Managers live on these tools! And management means setting deadlines, switching "gears", unblocking others, shifting priorities... things you can't do on the Makers' tools.
My thesis is that on this massive, abrupt shift to working remotely, management tools not only haven't been able to keep up with a Manager's needs, but they have created new jobs-to-be-done. Whatever JTBD you may think of, it all comes down to one key constraint: finite time.
Prior to the covid-19 crisis, time was dealt with 20th-century, office-first, protocols. Hierarchical, cultural and physical protocols that double down as constraints: seniority, office distribution, culture, capital allocation, permissions, etc. Basically, a CEO's unit-of-time was 1,000x more valuable than a jr sales rep's.
It is baffling then to realize how far these management tools are from replicating those real-life constraints. While we live in a physical world of -certain- scarcity, the Manager's tech stack is an open firehose of emails, notifications, channels and threads that keep piling on until the system collapses... or he/she breaks down.
To reach parity and increase productivity across teams, the tech stack should aim to replicate the best out of these constraints, leaving the "bad" ones (9-to-5, all-sync, top-down, command & control, etc.) behind.
By "replicating" I don't mean adding new features (copied from competitors); I mean toppling a few paradigms off their pedestals prior to start building a more decentralized, constrained-ridden (less-is-more) management tool.
Thoughts?