Ask Your Developer Quotes

“People in any field rise to the expectations set for them.”
― Jeff Lawson, Ask Your Developer: How to Harness the Power of Software Developers and Win in the 21st Century – A Management Playbook for Tech Industry Leadership and Digital Transformation

“there are four attributes in software development: features, deadlines, quality, and certainty. Generally speaking, you can pick any three, but you can’t have all four.”
― Jeff Lawson, Ask Your Developer: How to Harness the Power of Software Developers and Win in the 21st Century – A Management Playbook for Tech Industry Leadership and Digital Transformation

“in school, the teacher knows the answers but shows students how to do the work to arrive at the answer on their own. In business, especially when you’re working on the cutting edge of technology, you’re not looking for an answer that someone else already knows. The business and its employees must find answers to questions that have not been asked before. But an open, learning environment provides the way to find those elusive answers.”
― Jeff Lawson, Ask Your Developer: How to Harness the Power of Software Developers and Win in the 21st Century – A Management Playbook for Tech Industry Leadership and Digital Transformation

“an open environment provides (a) guardrails and (b) support. Instead of “sink or swim,” we give people swim lessons—and even let them wear floaties if they need them.”
― Jeff Lawson, Ask Your Developer: How to Harness the Power of Software Developers and Win in the 21st Century – A Management Playbook for Tech Industry Leadership and Digital Transformation

“instead of letting developers just run around and do whatever they want, autonomy actually has its basis in rules. Without guardrails, people won’t know how to make decisions, and leaders will tend to second-guess them constantly. By creating rules, you paradoxically set people free—in the space between guardrails.”
― Jeff Lawson, Ask Your Developer: How to Harness the Power of Software Developers and Win in the 21st Century – A Management Playbook for Tech Industry Leadership and Digital Transformation

“thing that kills an entrepreneurial, experimental culture is when people get punished for running an experiment that proves a hypothesis false. (Note that I don’t call this “failing.”)”
― Jeff Lawson, Ask Your Developer: How to Harness the Power of Software Developers and Win in the 21st Century – A Management Playbook for Tech Industry Leadership and Digital Transformation

“What we learned is that when you conduct experiments, you should remember to hold back resources to give needed rocket boosters to the winning experiments.”
― Jeff Lawson, Ask Your Developer: How to Harness the Power of Software Developers and Win in the 21st Century – A Management Playbook for Tech Industry Leadership and Digital Transformation

“But in every market, the company with the best software will eventually win. As Jeff Immelt, the former”
― Jeff Lawson, Ask Your Developer: How to Harness the Power of Software Developers and Win in the 21st Century – A Management Playbook for Tech Industry Leadership and Digital Transformation

“What matters isn't how you use servers, but rather how you serve users.”
― Jeff Lawson, Ask Your Developer: How to Harness the Power of Software Developers and Win in the 21st Century – A Management Playbook for Tech Industry Leadership and Digital Transformation

“They're victims of the digital revolution, because they didn't adapt quickly enough. The dodo birds of digital Darwinism.”
― Jeff Lawson, Ask Your Developer: How to Harness the Power of Software Developers and Win in the 21st Century – A Management Playbook for Tech Industry Leadership and Digital Transformation

“For traditional companies, keeping up means speeding up. These companies get that they can't or couldn't afford to spend six to twelve months in development before they launch. Ask Blockbuster, Borders, Nokia, your local taxi company even.”
― Jeff Lawson, Ask Your Developer: How to Harness the Power of Software Developers and Win in the 21st Century – A Management Playbook for Tech Industry Leadership and Digital Transformation

“It is not the strongest species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the ones most responsive to change. —Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species”
― Jeff Lawson, Ask Your Developer: How to Harness the Power of Software Developers and Win in the 21st Century – A Management Playbook for Tech Industry Leadership and Digital Transformation

“Finally, these overnight rollouts demonstrated the incredible human creativity and adaptability of developers who work inside corporations. Many were using these new tools for the first time and under great duress—and yet they figured things out and got everybody up and working.”
― Jeff Lawson, Ask Your Developer: How to Harness the Power of Software Developers and Win in the 21st Century – A Management Playbook for Tech Industry Leadership and Digital Transformation

“These quick rollouts also taught us a few things. First was how great things can happen when people stop worrying about making mistakes or not getting everything perfect the first time around. During the COVID-19 crisis, change was free. There were no alternatives, no office politics, and no fear of mistakes—because the alternatives were far worse. It’s what happens when management doesn’t have time to hold a bunch of meetings, to send requests and approvals up and down the chain of command or to insist on huge master plans that never end up being what you build anyway. Under pressure-cooker conditions, management and developers could quickly come to alignment, and then let developers problem-solve and invent solutions.”
― Jeff Lawson, Ask Your Developer: How to Harness the Power of Software Developers and Win in the 21st Century – A Management Playbook for Tech Industry Leadership and Digital Transformation

“hospitals were overwhelmed with patients, and more. Suddenly digital transformation projects slated to take place over several years were happening in days or weeks. It was the great digital acceleration, not by choice but by existential necessity driven by the largest global pandemic in a century.”
― Jeff Lawson, Ask Your Developer: How to Harness the Power of Software Developers and Win in the 21st Century – A Management Playbook for Tech Industry Leadership and Digital Transformation

“By allowing teams to duplicate work if they need to, you also let the teams show you, with their valuable time and skills, where you need to invest. It’s like that old story: An architect is asked to design a college campus. Upon presenting the final campus design, the regents point out that there are no walking paths. The architect’s reply? “We’ll let the students decide with their feet where the sidewalks should go. Within a year, it’ll be obvious.”
― Jeff Lawson, Ask Your Developer: How to Harness the Power of Software Developers and Win in the 21st Century – A Management Playbook for Tech Industry Leadership and Digital Transformation

“Werner Vogels of Amazon notes that this approach—where you’re knowingly permissive of duplicated work—is often a nonstarter at traditional companies, which tend to feel it’s out of control or chaotic. “It’s so counterintuitive for them because they’re all about efficiency,” he explains. “They’re used to having top-down control, and in essence the hierarchy becomes more important than moving fast.”
― Jeff Lawson, Ask Your Developer: How to Harness the Power of Software Developers and Win in the 21st Century – A Management Playbook for Tech Industry Leadership and Digital Transformation

“However, as awesome as I’ve made Admiral sound, teams are not required to use it. Small-team autonomy means that they’re not forced to use a particular tool if they don’t want to. Instead, they choose to use it. So Jason, like anybody “selling” a product, has to win over his customers: the internal developers at Twilio. That’s where his principles really come into play.”
― Jeff Lawson, Ask Your Developer: How to Harness the Power of Software Developers and Win in the 21st Century – A Management Playbook for Tech Industry Leadership and Digital Transformation

“something that we at Twilio consider to be almost a sacred value: the person who writes the code also “wears the pager” for that code after it goes into production. It’s your code. If it crashes, you fix it.”
― Jeff Lawson, Ask Your Developer: How to Harness the Power of Software Developers and Win in the 21st Century – A Management Playbook for Tech Industry Leadership and Digital Transformation

“One of Jason’s favorite expressions is “We don’t have rules—we have guardrails.” But if you go off-roading, you’re still on the hook for things like security and resiliency, which makes the paved path look all the more attractive.”
― Jeff Lawson, Ask Your Developer: How to Harness the Power of Software Developers and Win in the 21st Century – A Management Playbook for Tech Industry Leadership and Digital Transformation

“something that we at Twilio consider to be almost a sacred value: the person who writes the code also “wears the pager” for that code after it goes into production. It’s your code. If it crashes, you fix”
― Jeff Lawson, Ask Your Developer: How to Harness the Power of Software Developers and Win in the 21st Century – A Management Playbook for Tech Industry Leadership and Digital Transformation

“DevOps, first conceived about a decade ago, represents an attempt to speed things up by having one developer handle all of the steps. The concept is reflected in the name itself: instead of having “developers” who write code and “operators” who do everything else, you combine all of the duties in one person. In a DevOps environment, the same developer writes the code, tests the code, packages it, monitors it, and remains responsible for it after it goes into production.”
― Jeff Lawson, Ask Your Developer: How to Harness the Power of Software Developers and Win in the 21st Century – A Management Playbook for Tech Industry Leadership and Digital Transformation

“Jason Hudak to head the platform team. Jason had worked at Yahoo for more than a decade, building the infrastructure to support their thousands of engineers. Jason is probably not what you imagine when you think of a software engineer. He’s a ruddy-faced Texan and a former Marine. He went to Texas Tech and studied business, not computer science. He’s more or less self-taught, having learned to write code after landing a job at a tech company in the 1990s and studying alongside engineers who recognized his potential. Jason spends his free time snorkeling, cycling, and hunting wild boars in Texas.”
― Jeff Lawson, Ask Your Developer: How to Harness the Power of Software Developers and Win in the 21st Century – A Management Playbook for Tech Industry Leadership and Digital Transformation

“It’s not uncommon for great software companies to invest upward of 50 percent of all R&D funds into infrastructure. But it will be tempting to question these investments. Every budget cycle, you’ll see a large expense around these infrastructure teams, and people will wonder if it’s really needed. Why are we hiring engineers to manage internal infrastructure instead of assigning more head count to the teams that create products for our customers? It’s because the software infrastructure makes all of your other developers more productive and more successful. Kill it, you’ll quickly realize how much leverage these”
― Jeff Lawson, Ask Your Developer: How to Harness the Power of Software Developers and Win in the 21st Century – A Management Playbook for Tech Industry Leadership and Digital Transformation

“Executives say they want innovation, but then unwittingly punish people for its natural consequences. And because human beings are good at pain avoidance, the desire to avoid punishment pretty quickly overrides the innovation directive. The result is an organization that moves slowly, is risk averse, and lacks accountability.”
― Jeff Lawson, Ask Your Developer: How to Harness the Power of Software Developers and Win in the 21st Century – A Management Playbook for Tech Industry Leadership and Digital Transformation

“The most religiously adhered-to rule is that small, autonomous teams are the basis of progress. We limit the size of teams to ten or fewer people. Instead of a planning system that imposes work on them, we ask them to draft their own goals each quarter based on what they’re hearing from customers. When their ideas of what’s needed differ from what leadership considers most important, it’s not a blind top-down mandate to take leadership’s word, but it sparks a very important discussion to resolve the conflict.”
― Jeff Lawson, Ask Your Developer: How to Harness the Power of Software Developers and Win in the 21st Century – A Management Playbook for Tech Industry Leadership and Digital Transformation

“That’s why many Agile products start as feature poor. Chances are, features aren’t as important as getting an idea in front of customers quickly. So deadlines trump features, with quality as an underlying assumption. Build less, but with confidence, is the path of many early product teams. If you’re right about the core, you can always iterate and build more features later.”
― Jeff Lawson, Ask Your Developer: How to Harness the Power of Software Developers and Win in the 21st Century – A Management Playbook for Tech Industry Leadership and Digital Transformation

“That’s why many Agile products start as feature poor. Chances are, features aren’t as important as getting an idea in front of customers quickly. So deadlines trump features, with quality as an underlying assumption.”
― Jeff Lawson, Ask Your Developer: How to Harness the Power of Software Developers and Win in the 21st Century – A Management Playbook for Tech Industry Leadership and Digital Transformation

“a given User Story still has a lot of unknowns regarding customer needs or implementation, then the Product Owner should push it out to answer those questions. This is part of a process called “grooming the backlog,” which is one of the Product Owner’s major responsibilities.”
― Jeff Lawson, Ask Your Developer: How to Harness the Power of Software Developers and Win in the 21st Century – A Management Playbook for Tech Industry Leadership and Digital Transformation

“short cycle times create great adaptability. When changes enter the picture, they can be accounted for in a future sprint because the team isn’t wed to anything beyond the current sprint.”
― Jeff Lawson, Ask Your Developer: How to Harness the Power of Software Developers and Win in the 21st Century – A Management Playbook for Tech Industry Leadership and Digital Transformation