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Rands-1.0-Hierarchy

4 min readStatus:Seedling

Lopp’s 1.0 Hierarchy is a Maslow-inspired diagnostic pyramid describing what a product team must have in place to successfully ship a first version. The four levels — Product, Process, People, Pitch — are ordered by dependency: each layer must be genuinely present before the layer above it can function.

Lopp deliberately presents the hierarchy as an inverted pyramid — wider at the top, narrowing to a point at the base. The instability is intentional: “upside-down pyramids fall over; the only way to keep them from falling over is to constantly push one side or the other.” Shipping a 1.0 is inherently precarious.

The Four Levels (Base to Apex)

1. Product — You must know what you are building.

  • The product must be validated by a neutral external party because the team has lost perspective through proximity.
  • Symptoms of failure: building in a vacuum, internal validation substituting for customer contact, losing sight of what customers actually need.
  • The lower the failure in the pyramid, the higher the cost — Product failure is the most recoverable, but it signals that every level above it is also compromised.

2. Process — You must have a visible way to build it.

  • Process defines communication. It does not need to be good or universally agreed upon; it must be visible and accessible to everyone.
  • Lopp: “If engineers are not constantly arguing about how they develop software, they are stagnating.”
  • Symptoms of failure: decisions made invisibly, duplicated work, Information-Starvation spreading silently through the team.

3. People — You must have the right team with the right urgency.

  • Everyone on the team must be working on the 1.0 with urgency; those who are not are passengers, not drivers — a distinction that maps onto Players-vs-Pawns.
  • People who do not believe in the Pitch “either don’t buy it or don’t get it” — the People level and Pitch level are mutually reinforcing.
  • Symptoms of failure: misaligned team chemistry, protected underperformers, new members who never test the Pitch against their own judgment.

4. Pitch — You must be able to explain it and earn organisational support.

  • The Pitch is the guiding north star: the shared great idea that the team must internalise deeply enough to make decisions without you.
  • A Pitch failure propagates destructively through every level below: People cannot align, Process has no north star, and Product is undefined.
  • Symptoms of failure: no one can explain what the product is for, scope creep without constraint, inability to say no.

Diagnostic Principle

The framework is a diagnostic tool: locate the lowest broken level and repair it first. Fixing Pitch without fixing Process leaves decisions invisible; fixing Process without fixing People leaves communication hollow. The inverted pyramid means every intervention at the top amplifies instability at the base.

Beyond 1.0

The hierarchy applies to any major initiative — engineering reorgs, pivots, large feature bets. The inverted pyramid metaphor explains why ambitious initiatives feel unstable even with talented teams: the higher the ambition (the wider the top), the more structural force is needed at every lower level to maintain coherence.

Future Connections

Sources

  • Lopp, Michael (2019). Managing Humans: Biting and Humorous Tales of a Software Engineering Manager. 3rd ed. Apress. ISBN: 978-1-484-23712-4.

  • Lopp, Michael (writing as “Rands”) (circa 2006). “1.0.” Rands in Repose (blog).

  • Maslow, Abraham H. (1943). “A Theory of Human Motivation.” Psychological Review, Vol. 50, No. 4, pp. 370–396.

    • Theoretical foundation for the prepotency hierarchy Lopp adapts. Maslow’s original model was probabilistic — a need requires sufficient (not complete) satisfaction before the next emerges; Lopp’s adaptation is stricter and more operational.
    • Available: https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1943-03751-001

  • Wasserman, Noam (2012). The Founder’s Dilemmas: Anticipating and Avoiding the Pitfalls That Can Sink a Startup. Princeton University Press. ISBN: 978-0-691-14913-4.

  • Brooks, Frederick P., Jr. (1995). The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering (Anniversary Edition). Addison-Wesley. ISBN: 978-0-201-83595-3.

    • Communication overhead grows as O(n²) with team size (50 developers create 1,225 communication channels). Directly validates Lopp’s Process level: process exists to manage communication; without visible process, team scaling destroys coordination.
    • Available: https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.5555/207583

Note

This content was drafted with assistance from AI tools for research, organization, and initial content generation. All final content has been reviewed, fact-checked, and edited by the author to ensure accuracy and alignment with the author’s intentions and perspective.

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