Feeling and Being Fast
John Cutler continues to provide really insightful content. Here's a table of things that make us feel fast vs. things that make us fast. Three more or less random takeouts.
Starting vs. finishing. Starting something new always gives that exciting energy boost, right? In German, there's that poetic expression "jedem Anfang wohnt ein Zauber inne" (there's magic in every beginning - credit to Hermann Hesse). Indeed it feels good, exciting, refreshing. And yet, how much does starting something new every day get us closer to finishing anything? When is the last time you've finished something? In coaching, I've sometimes, when my clients had trouble with work-in-progress limitation, used the question "What is the ratio of things you started this week or month over things you completed in the same time span?" - let's say that a ratio greater than one, carried along over several time periods, indicates trouble. Let's be finishers.
Cutting corners vs. quality focus. A bug's life should be short. Ideally, it never comes to existence. With a strong sense of craftsmanship and with taking pride in what we produce, we will avoid cutting corners because it feels like cheating. We simply, plainly owe this to our customers.
Design then build vs. participatory design. How about having the frontend engineer and the designer sit down together and pair solve the problem they're facing, rather than having the former implement the design produced by the latter? Pair programming has proven worthwhile, why wouldn't pairing across functions? I've personally experienced exciting delivery throughput in a truly cross-functional team that spanned all relevant functions, from business stakeholder over product manager and designer to engineer. Everyone truly collaborating on the matter was absolutely compelling.
What are your comments?
Tags: work