Building a Culture of Quality
To produce high-quality work, it’s best to finish existing projects before starting new ones. Arrange projects in a way that builds on previous work, making changes feel natural and having a compounding effect. Encourage project leads to seeking help and share, not report status or expected completion dates. A balanced roadmap should divide up to one-third of total work hours into bugs, fixes, and backlog items.
Technical roadmaps are crucial for setting direction and aligning everyone to work toward the same goals. Estimate projects and expect them to take longer than anticipated. Avoid adding too many tasks to the roadmap; instead, be ambitious with a few more projects than practical to motivate the team to ship. Building a culture of continuous learning and improvement is essential for safe teams. Foster a learning culture with blameless post-mortems to understand problems and drive solutions. We often crave speed and innovation but are open to risk and don’t trust our team members. Our current system doesn’t work, but we need help to envision an alternative. We must trust each other and allow our best people to use their judgment and do the right thing. We face systemic challenges, but change is possible if we can overcome our addiction to bureaucracy.
