I'm sure there are essays and writeups about this that I don't have off the top of my head. I do have a lot of examples.

In journalism, this insight becomes quite obvious after you've been on a beat for a few years and see how things really work, that is, how things are mostly mundane, and corruption or injustice isn't obvious because if they were, they would've been snuffed out (or obfuscated). So the devil is always in the details.

One of my favorite Pulitzer-winning stories is an investigation from the Sun-Sentinel (Florida) newspaper that majorly busted cops for speeding. Ostensibly, the big picture idea here is "who polices the police?"...but that by definition is an incredibly tricky thing to identify. After all, it's the police who create and record the data related to law breaking. So how did the Sun-Sentinel do it?

It started off with this widely-shared viral video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hk44_bIhmGY

But the Sun-Sentinel reporters weren't content with the status quo -- i.e. shrugging and thinking oh everyone knows that cops speed all the time. They wanted to prove it. And their method was quite ingenious and so mathematically airtight that cops were being disciplined even before the story came out: http://www.ire.org/blog/ire-news/2013/04/15/how-sun-sentinel...

Here's the entry in the Pulitzer Awards for 2013: http://www.pulitzer.org/winners/sun-sentinel

If you go through the Pulitzer winning entries, many of them include the cover letters for the award submission. Those letters will often describe how a small detail or curiosity grew into a big investigation.

The tech scene is full of examples. Is there a single successful unicorn that, whatever their lofty motto is today, didn't start with fulfilling a very basic need? Facebook's mission today is to connect the world, but its early prototype was a faster way to lookup co-eds. Likewise, Google's mission to organize the world's information began with the implementation of the almost too-obvious (but genius) PageRank/Backrub algorithm.

https://web.archive.org/web/20090126204112/http://ilpubs.sta...

And of course, there's always Dr. Feynman's recounting of how he came up with the idea that would eventually lead to his Nobel Prize: https://www.physics.ohio-state.edu/~kilcup/262/feynman.html

I agree with the headline, even if the content of the op-ed is kind of a mess. Reminds me of Etsy's Code as Craft Speaker Series. My favorite talks by far were the ones that focused on pretty minute issues, such as how to do A/B testing at scale, or how to manage multiple CDNs. Not because those are issues I've ever had to deal with professionally, but because how the details are dealt with are not only interesting from a technical standpoint, but they provide concrete info about a company's values and expectations. In the talk about multiple CDNs, for example, I found it interesting that Etsy had built a substantial amount of infrastructure to auto-detect the failure of a CDN, but it was always up to the engineer on-duty to wake up and push the button to switch CDNs.

In contrast, sometimes the Etsy talks would have grander topics, such as how to be a better entrepreneur, which were often filled with platitudes that offered no real insight or actionable advice.

As a teacher, I tell students that the best way to make an impact is to focus on the details. Because if you even know the details of an important problem like world hunger or injustice, it at least means you've done some research. More importantly, students need to realize that if something is indeed a big, "important" problem, it means that many, many people have been working on it. If these problems could be solved simply by people thinking, "I want to end world hunger!", then they wouldn't be big, complex problems.

Some PMs wear at times the peer hat. However I believe it is not a good idea to consider yourself a peer. Confusion about roles can lead to conflicts. By design the PM has to have to last word in most critical decisions, especially with outside contacts and that makes one stand out. An important part of the PM role is to say "NO" to all sides - while a peer may say only "no" - and this requires power. How to achieve a power position and how to maintain (wrt. to team but also other parties) it is also part of the PMs work.

Particularly at the beginning I would think carefully - possibly with the help of an experienced peer aka senior project manager - how to divide responsibility in the project. I found RACI (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Responsibility_assignment_matr...) often a robust and quick way to get started navigating a new project setup.

Thanks, I really appreciate it =)

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