Convo about Dragons... avoid or embrace

Learnings from our Rock: Its tough to do things within the appetite without knowledge of the part of the product you are working in. As Andrew would say, there were “a bunch of dragons hiding in those caves”. In our case our lack of expertise makes it more difficult to see these “dragons” when we took on these tickets. Over the next quarter we will fine tune our kanban process to try to catch these things earlier in the development period.

This is an excerpt from a weekly update I asked my team to do.

See anything about this that you’d coach?

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No?

Here is my response:

Its tough to do things within the appetite without knowledge of the part of the product you are working in

This is a part of the process. We find the :dragon: and we decide if we :crossed_swords: or :running-pug: Tho, we will work to pre-find the :dragon: …. just don’t want to set the expectations that we will find them all before we begin :female-construction-worker::skin-tone-5:

The engineer then responded with:

I agree that this is just another part of engineering. However, we should seek to find solutions that help us spot these earlier in the cycle. Good news is that we have potential solutions including deeper shaping processes, early pairing with more experienced engineers, and/or setting L10 topics to discuss with the group. Until we have had our chance to cut our teeth more on legacy code we will likely have to rely on some of the other things we have at our disposal. Regardless, we should strive to be more intentional with these options (and think of new ones) otherwise we may continue to flounder on some of the more insidious “dragons”.

The convo went cold after this final response from me:

Fair… the point of me saying that was to combat:

we may continue to flounder on some of the more insidious “dragons”

That is a posture I’d like to coach to not avoid, but to lean into. Anytime something is inevitable you can try to stop it from happening or you can focus on “mean time to recovery” where we move fast, find dragons fast, and adjust. As opposed to ensuring there are no dragons from the start.

• Focus on these being learning moments

  • early pairing with more experienced engineers

• Focus on trying to stop them from happening

  • deeper shaping processes
  • setting L10 topics to discuss with the group

:point_up::skin-tone-5: I’m trying to encourage investment in the first bucket. Waterfall has taught us that the second is deceptively the most intuitive, but often does not always net the best results. Learn via experiences and observations. These are some lean and DevOps principles that we can embrace, even if they are counter-intuitive :+1::skin-tone-5:

I’m curious what you think? The right coaching? Or would you have taken a more “you are right… seek out the dragons early” approach?