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light My Insights: Be very careful when copy-paste models that work for certain people and organizations (e.g.: the Spotify Model). These models tend to be designed for complex system of systems, which most likely are different from yours. Get inspiration from those models and cases, but don’t just force it into your situation. Instead, focus on understanding your problems (e.g.: organization situation), its challenges and “DNA” and from there build up strategies to address your particular problems and reach your own goals, from your own atomic elements.

Analysis & Summary

Taking decisions by analogy is the prevalent way of thinking in present times (others did this, we should probably too). The Tech world is no exception, for example: organizations blindly adopting Microservices because Netflix did so; or copying the “Spotify Model” (snapshot) because it seemed to have worked great for Spotify. This way of thinking is dangerous and in most cases leads to undesired or sub-optimal situations. Why? Because we force ourselves to follow the approach for the problem of someone else. Such approach was designed for their particular problem and as such it shouldn’t be a surprise when most of the times this leads to a sub-optimal results on our particular problems.

What is an alternative way to approach this? Using “First Principles thinking”. This article by James Clear gives a nice intro to what First Principles thinking is. In a nutshell First Principles thinking is about breaking things/problems down to the atomic pieces/knowledge/truths and from there build up strategies that use those atomic elements so we can best address our particular problem. The article talks about some specific situations and examples, namely how Elon Musk continuously applies this way of thinking to completely revolutionize several industries.