What Recurring Issue is Your Team Complaining About?
An Essay About the Endless Cycle of Avoiding Responsibility
You have a lot to juggle as a tech leader and most senior person on your team. Roadmaps, estimates, onboarding, off-boarding, crisis meetings, vacation time, security, delivering fast, maintaining high quality.
The list is as long as you can imagine.
You visit conferences, attend workshops, watch the latest YouTube trends on DDD Europe and you even participate in chat on the Technologist Podcast.
But there’s that missing link. How do I apply any of that on my team? For those of you who are reading this and are not in a management role, you may have already given up saying “Yes, but not on my team. My team’s project is different. DDD won’t work. TDD won’t work. Pair programming won’t work. Agile won’t work. We tried.”
Tried. And failed.
And given up.
“Stop talking about your problems. If it isn't really a problem, stop talking about it. If it really is a problem, what are you doing about it?” — Niels Malotaux
Stop talking about your technical debt. Start dealing with it.
Michael Jordan failed to make the basketball team on his first year.
Harrison Ford was a self-employed carpenter till he got offered the role for Star Wars. He was 35 at the time.
A true leader of a winning team isn’t someone who has a 100% win streak. It’s someone who has failed 99 times and has persevered through to improve. The purpose of goal-setting isn’t to tunnel-vision on achieving the goal.
The goal serves as a guiding star on your journey to becoming the person who can achieve that goal. It’s the mistakes along the way that shape a great athlete, a great entrepreneur and a great team.
They have tried. And failed.
And learned from their mistakes.
The search for the Perfect Team
Engineers love romanticising the idea of working with a smoothly operating, low-stress team. A team that doesn’t make silly mistakes. A team that doesn’t need painful pivots and learning experiences.
They will hop jobs to find it. They will switch jobs to cling onto it.
I know, I’ve been there.
But I got lucky.
Most engineers get stuck on this rabbit-chase. Only to realise 20 company-hops later that their career has come to an end and they still reminisce about that one team.
But they never tried to recreate its success.
What a shame.
With all that effort… If only they knew they were so close to crafting such a team.
Turning mistakes and bad habits into Culture
Culture isn’t about rigid processes that prevent you from making mistakes.
You shape and craft your culture when you decide to respond to your mistakes immediately and do something about them.
Turn every recurring issue into a superpower.
Turn every recurring bug into customer obsession.
Turn your slow, painful deploys into continuous delivery.
Turn your finger-crossing and manual testing into automation.
Immediately.
Not on the next sprint planning.
Not on the next quarterly.
Not on the off-site.
When you start complaining about it. Today.
Take the leap.
Deal with your process.
What recurring issue is your team complaining about?