Debugging Teams: Better Productivity through Collaboration

by Brian W. Fitzpatrick

Persuasion by proxy

Despite the fact that it may pain you to hear

your words coming out of another (perhaps despised) person’s mouth, it’s often the most effortless way for an idea to travel.

As tempting as it might be to spend a ton of time cleaning up your code base and refactoring things, we’ve learned from experience that if you dedicate more than

half of your time to this kind of defensive work, it’s hardly valued at all by anyone outside of your team, including your superiors.

Defensive activities make the product more maintainable, stable, and reliable. And yet, despite the fact that they’re absolutely critical, you get no political credit for doing them. If you spend all your time on them, people perceive your product as holding still. And to make wordplay on an old maxim: “Perception is nine-tenths of the law.”

We now have a handy rule we live by: a team should never spend more than one-third to one-half of its time and energy on defensive work, no matter how much technical debt

there is. Any more time spent is a recipe for po...

if you perform your job to the letter of the law and focus only on getting your own work done to the exclusion of all else, there will be few chance opportunities for you. If you help others get their jobs done when given the chance,

even when it’s not part of your job, there’s no guarantee (nor should there be a “tit for tat” expectation) that they’ll return the favor, but many people will gladly repay the favor in the future if given the chance.

It’s incredibly useful to develop an awareness of when you’re gaining political capital, and when you’re spending it.

A good Three Bullets and a Call to Action email contains (at most) three bullet points detailing the issue at hand, and one — and only one — call to action.

Programmers tend to have an overdeveloped sense of logic, but most humans are driven equally by logic and emotion. The marketing folks are masters of emotional manipulation, and that’s why they’re so effective: they mix the facts with feelings to get attention.

You need at least a minimal marketing strategy to even get your software in the ring, and if you’re smart about it then you’ll discover that marketing can be a serious force multiplier for great engineering.

There are two more watchwords that should become the cornerstones of the way you interact with users: trust and delight.

They trust you because the cumulative set of interactions they’ve had with you add up to an overall emotionally positive state.

there is no such thing as a temporary lapse of integrity.

Trust is your most sacred resource. Watch it carefully. Measure the size of the bank account. Before every move, think about how it will affect the bank account.

Marketing

Be aware of how people perceive your software; it determines whether they even try it out.

Product ...

If your software isn’t easy to try, fast, friendly, and accessible, ...

Customer ...

Proactive engagement with long-term users affects your software’s evoluti...

reason we’re writing software at all. It’s not for you, or your team, or your company. It’s to make life easier for users. It’s critical to pay attention to what they’re thinking and saying about your product and how they’re experiencing it over the long run.

HRT: humility, respect, and trust.

As we explained in the first chapter, these three core traits are the things that need to underlie every social action you make and every relationship you cultivate. And if you look carefully you’ll find that nearly every social problem stems from a lack of one of these traits.