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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Gene Kim
Punishing failure and “shooting the messenger” only cause people to hide their mistakes, and eventually, all desire to innovate is completely extinguished.
Creating software should be a collaborative and conversational endeavor—individuals need to interact with each other to create new knowledge and value for the customer.
Without constant feedback from a centralized build, integration, and test system, they really have no idea what will happen when all their work is merged with everyone else’s.
When you hire a plumber or a carpenter, you expect them to bring their own tools. But in a software organization with more than one developer, the entire team uses common tools to be productive.
But she knows that there’s something even more important than code: the systems that enable developers to be productive, so that they can write high-quality code quickly and safely, freeing themselves from all the things that prevent them from solving important business problems.
Everyone around here thinks features are important, because they can see them in their app, on the web page, or in the API. But no one seems to realize how important the build process is. Developers cannot be productive without a great build, integration, and test process.
developers need a system where they can get fast and continual feedback on the quality of their work. If you don’t find problems quickly, you end up finding them months later. By then, the problem is lost in all the other changes that every other developer made, so the link between cause and effect disappears without a trace.
To her surprise, she feels sad and dispirited—at work, there is none of the joy and learning that she just experienced here. She wonders if this is how everyone on the Phoenix Project feels all the time.
She loves seeing other people’s ingenuity and their willingness to make the app better. As the project owner, she sees it as her primary responsibility to ensure that any contributor can be productive.
She knows it’s dispiriting when you submit a change to someone’s project, but no one ever looks at it or they tell you that it can’t be integrated. If that happens enough, people eventually give up or fork your project and splinter the community.
She is able to build things with focus, flow, and joy. She had fast feedback in her work. People were able to do what they wanted without being dependent on scores of other people.
Maxine has seen how Dev and Ops interact around Phoenix. Instead of acting like an actual team, they act more like sovereign states on the brink of war, with diplomats trying to patch together an uneasy peace, complete with embassies, protocols, and official formalities.
Maxine leaves, boggling at what he said. She has never in her career abdicated all testing and deployment to someone else. How can you create anything of value if you don’t have feedback on how it’s used? she thinks.
she notices that everyone has a small sticker of the Rebel Alliance from Star Wars on their laptop, just like the X-Wing pilots wore on their helmets. She grins at their subtle but subversive badges of solidarity.
this is what an effective network is all about—when you can assemble a group of motivated people to solve a big problem, even though the team looks nothing like the official org chart. I’m pretty sure I’ll learn and achieve more with this group then I would by having lunch with Sarah, she thinks.
Throughout the day, all decisions and escalations quickly grind to a standstill, even for emergencies, which Maxine didn’t expect. She discovers why: every manager insists on being a part of the communication plan. Why? They want to hear any bad news first, so they don’t appear out of touch and can massage any messages up the chain.
The lack of trust and too much information flowing around is causing things to go slower and slower.
Apparently, everyone has had to go home sick. The Phoenix release forced people to work long hours together in close proximity all day and night, and with little sleep. Now everyone is dropping like flies.
How do we keep our people healthy enough so they can actually do their jobs? And how do we keep them happy enough so they don’t quit?
Locality in our code is what keeps systems loosely coupled, enabling us to deliver features faster. Teams can quickly and independently develop, test, and deploy value to customers.
“You should be able to create value by changing one file, one module, one service, one component, one API call, one container, one app, or whatever!
it was originally defined by Ward Cunningham in 2003. He said, ‘technical debt is what you feel the next time you want to make a change.’ There are many things that people call technical debt, but it usually refers to things we need to clean up, or where we need to create or restore simplicity, so that that we can quickly, confidently, and safely make changes to the system.
Your teams are able to add features at a rate that the entire Phoenix team should envy. And that is only possible because you pay down technical debt as a part of daily work. It’s a magnificent example of the First Ideal of Locality and Simplicity in our code and organizations.
the First Ideal of Locality and Simplicity. We need to design things so that we have locality in our systems and the organizations that build them. And we need simplicity in everything we do. The last place we want complexity is internally, whether it’s in our code, in our organization, or in our processes.
“The Second Ideal is Focus, Flow, and Joy. It’s all about how our daily work feels.
The Third Ideal is Improvement of Daily Work. Reflect upon what the Toyota Andon cord teaches us about how we must elevate improvement of daily work over daily work itself. The Fourth Ideal is Psychological Safety, where we make it safe to talk about problems, because solving problems requires prevention, which requires honesty, and honesty requires the absence of fear. In manufacturing, psychological safety is just as important as physical safety. And finally, the Fifth Ideal is Customer Focus, where we ruthlessly question whether something actually matters to our customers, as in, are they
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The First Ideal—Locality and Simplicity The Second Ideal—Focus, Flow, and Joy The Third Ideal—Improvement of Daily Work The Fourth Ideal—Psychological Safety The Fifth Ideal—Customer Focus
Software is like a city, constantly undergoing change, needing renovations and repair.
Maxine is impressed that Tom can even reproduce the problem at all. Someone once called these problems “heisenbugs,” referring to the quantum physics phenomena where the act of observation changes the nature of reality itself.
Erik’s Second Ideal of Focus, Flow, and Joy.
First Ideal of Locality and Simplicity.
CEO Bill Gates was so concerned that he wrote a famous internal memo to every employee, stating that if a developer has to choose between implementing a feature or improving security, they must choose security, because nothing less than the survival of the company was at stake. And thus began the famous security stand-down that affected every product at Microsoft. Interestingly, Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, still has a culture that if a developer ever has a choice between working on a feature or developer productivity, they should always choose developer productivity.
“Business people can see features or apps, so getting funding for those is easy,” he continues. “But they don’t see the vast architectures underneath that support them, connecting systems, teams, and data to each other. And underneath that is something extraordinarily important: the systems that developers use in their daily work to be productive.
the First Ideal of Locality and Simplicity
Second Ideal of Focus, Flow, and Joy.
Third Ideal of Improvement of ...
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the Third Ideal is Improvement of Daily Work. It is the dynamic that allows us to change and improve how we work, informed by learning.
problems are quickly seen, swarmed, and solved, and then those learnings are spread far and wide, so all may benefit,” he says. “This is what enables innovation, excellence, and outlearning the competition.
because the distance from where decisions are made and where work is performed keeps growing, the quality of our outcomes diminish.
‘a bad system will beat a good person every time.’
“That’s not servant leadership, it’s transformational leadership,” Erik says. “It requires understanding the vision of the organization, the intellectual stimulation to question the basic assumptions of how work is performed, inspirational communication, personal recognition, and supportive leadership.
Fourth Ideal of Psychological Safety. No one will take risks, experiment, or innovate in a culture of fear, where people are afraid to tell the boss bad news,”
“The Fourth Ideal asserts that we need psychological safety, where it is safe for anyone to talk about problems.
“When something goes wrong, we ask ‘what caused the problem,’ not ‘who.’ We commit to doing what it takes to make tomorrow better than today.
Safety is a precondition of work.’”
‘Everyone must be responsible for their own safety and the safety of their teammates. If you see something that could hurt someone, you must fix it as quickly as possible.’
We don’t even need guards anymore. We love being prisoners so much, we just think the bars are there to keep us safe.
