Chapter 8 (Project Inversion)
- There is an ongoing Feature freeze
- For 30 days, no new features are to be made. Developers are asked to pay down technical debt - Work on high priority defects and stabilizing the code base
- Eric joins them saying “Every tech giant has nearly been killed by technical debt; Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Google, Microsoft, eBay, LinkedIn, Twitter. The consequences could’ve been fatal. For example, Nokia who fell from the loftiest heights, killed by technical debt. It is a fact of life, like deadlines. Business people understand deadlines but often are completely oblivious that technical debt even exists. It happens because in our daily work, we are often making tradeoff decisions. Taking shortcuts, hard coding things, basically manual workarounds. This impacts our future productivity. All the tech giants at some point in their history have paid down technical debt using the feature freeze.
- Consider Microsoft in the early 2000s, where viruses and worms were so common. Bill Gates was so concerned he wrote an internal memo, “If a developer has to choose between implementing a feature and implementing security, he has to choose security”. Interestingly, Satya Nadella, current CEO of Microsoft, also has a culture that if a developer has to choose between working on a feature or developer productivity, he has to choose developer productivity.
- Nokia spent hundreds of millions of dollars hiring developers and investing in rolling out agile but they did so without realizing their problem, technical debt in the form of an architecture where developers cannot be productive. They lacked the conviction to rebuild the foundation of their technical systems.
- Platform not only connects systems, teams and data to each other but also maintains the systems developers use in their daily work to be productive. This is where the best engineers are assigned so every developer
- 1st ideal: Locality and simplicity
- 2nd ideal: Focus, flow and joy
- 3rd ideal: Improvement of daily work - informed by learning - enables Innovation, excellence and outlearning the competition
- 4th ideal: psychological safety - when people are afraid of the bosses, no one will take risks, experiment or innovate in a culture of fear. Novelty is discouraged, when a problem occurs, it’s all about “Who caused the problem?” Name, blame and shame that person - new rules, more approvals, more training and rid themselves of the ‘bad apple’
- 5th ideal: Customer focus
- What is the opposite of this? Process compliance, rules and regulations, processes and procedures, approvals and stage gates, new rules everytime, infrequent release schedules
- A bad system will beat a good person every time.