The Investment into Quality

September 07, 2020

#1 – September 07, 2020

this week's favorite

Unless you're willing to invest heavily into quality, forget about "Agile".

Over the last few years, some teams we’ve worked with experienced projects that suffered from only having the toggles’ costs but failed to get the anticipated benefits. These teams ended up being reticent about the use of toggles and maintaining them longer than necessary. In other projects however, we saw toggles being utilized in a completely different way that delivered all of the benefits, minimized the overhead, and even helped in structuring the team’s priorities.

Good tech leads act as a member of the team, and consider themselves successful when the team is successful. They take their share of unsexy grungy work and clear roadblocks so their team can operate at 100%. They work to broaden the technical capabilities of their team, making sure knowledge of critical systems is not concentrated in one or two minds.

Can you imagine having 1 day a week, every week, allocated to growing your engineering skills? We do so since we genuinely believe (and that’s proven on a daily basis), that investing this time makes us better engineers and significantly increases our velocity, productivity and daily joy of creation.

Making the switch to managing managers, and hence managing many teams, can be taxing on the brain. If you’ve not done it before, then you may look at others in more senior roles, potentially running organizations of hundreds of people, and wonder to yourself how they ever find any clock time or mental time for getting anything done.

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