I was at LeadDev Berlin earlier this month, and a lot of the conversations kept circling back to metrics. The thing I kept coming back to, though, is that pretty much all of these metrics work just fine in theory. The problem is that every one of them depends on a handful of definitions, and these definitions are where things start getting a bit tricky. »
I've been working in software for about 15 years now, and over that time I've made a lot of mistakes and learned from a lot of other people's mistakes. This experience is a deep well that I can draw from when discussing possible solutions for both technical and non-technical problems. This is how I know what sorts of solutions sound good in theory but run into problems in practice, or what fringe idea is actually a perfect fit for the problem we're trying to solve here. This knowledge & experience is a big part of what has made me effective as a leader. »
It's pretty well known that for teams to work well, there needs to be trust. The thing is, it's said so often that I think it's lost its meaning a bit. Everybody says they trust folks, but then their behavior doesn't actually show that. Personally, I think many people don't even realize that the behavior they're exhibiting indicates a lack of trust, and this behavior comes from a misunderstanding of what it means to really trust someone, and so that's what I wanted to cover today. »
For most of my career, the software I was building was basically the entirety of the product the company sold. We worked with our colleagues in Product to decide what we would build next to serve our customers' needs, we wrote some code to solve those problems, and then we shipped it. It's easy to show impact when the value your team delivers is derived almost entirely from the software you ship to production. »
Nearly every conversation I've been in about software quality treats it as a tradeoff with speed. You can move fast, or you can be correct, and your job as a lead is to pick a point on that line and defend it. I've never really believed in this, and with AI speeding things up further this is a bigger topic. After a few years of being the person accountable for both the speed and the quality of what a team ships, I've come to think that bugs in production aren't really the problem here. »