Your Ops Review == Your Engineering Culture… Part 1

About a year and a half ago, I went through the interview process at Facebook. They are a fascinating company, one that I deeply respect, and they run what I believe is the largest application in the world. The technological challenges they face on a daily basis really piqued my interest and I wanted to see if there was a good match there.

Long story short, I chose to take a role to Amazon Web Services S3 instead of Facebook. However, I walked away from the interview with more than a job offer — I learned a lesson that has really stuck with me. In one of my interviews, the interviewer only had one question:

“True or false, the culture of an engineering organization is dictated by your ops review?”

So I thought about it for a minute, and said “yes, I believe it does.” We then talked about why I thought that, positive and negative experiences I’ve seen along the way, how to build a stronger operations culture, etc… The reason this question stuck with me was that it wasn’t until a few months later, while working at Amazon, that it really sunk in how insightful and accurate the statement was. There are a number of different sources that talk about the Amazon way and their rabid attention to details (e.g. book, NYT article) so I won’t delve into that here, but what I can say is that it was the first time I observed how directly linked the ops review and the engineering culture were. What I want to focus on is some of the various ways this single posit can manifest itself inside any organization.

Why do I believe this statement is true?

1. Earning Customer Trust — Our customers expect that the services they rely on work twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. There is no shortage of choice, so when a service doesn’t work, customers will find an alternative that they can count on. Customer trust is earned over a lifetime and lost in an instant. By having a rabid focus on operations and ensuring our production services are always functioning and always available, we are earning customer trust inch by inch each and every day. Our customers don’t care about what we are working on next if what we’ve already shipped doesn’t work. We owe it to them to keep our services available and functioning as that is the only way that we have earned the right to deliver them something new. Without that rabid operations focus, we are just waiting to see our customer trust erode.
2. Attention == Importance — Our leaders illustrate the most valuable parts of the business as a reflection of where they invest their attention. When your most senior leaders have never attended an operations review in their life, you can make an assessment about how strongly they value it. If leaders don’t demonstrate what they care about with their attention, why should anyone else care? In contrast, when you have a weekly operations review and your engineering leaders are there every week and participating in every discussion, that sends a different message to the team. That is leading by example.
3. A Blameless Culture — There are a number of articles and posts about how transformative blameless cultures can be. My personal favorite technology example is described in the Etsy article from a few years ago. I won’t dive deeply into creating a blameless culture, but focus on the ramifications of integrating it into your operations review. By running your operations review as an environment of learning and one that is devoid of blame, you reinforce a culture that values learning over everything else. A learning culture recognizes we can’t change the past, but we can change the future. The only path to changing the future is to avoid our past mistakes, and the only way to avoid repeating those mistakes is to learn from them and disseminate that knowledge as far and wide across the organization as possible. Running an operations review that spans your entire organization and focuses on learning from our collective missteps creates a team that will avoid learning the same lesson over and over again and enable us to provide reliable, always available services that our customers have come to expect.
4. Pride of Craftsmanship — As a team, we work hard to build our products. Once we have shared our products with the world, we owe it to our customers and to ourselves to ensure that they continue to function as we intended and provide a fantastic experience. Not investing the necessary time to provide care and feeding for your services in production is like building an intricate landscape at your house and then never watering the plants or mowing the lawn.

Each of these items are reflections of a strong, customer-focused, learning culture. The weekly operations review is the drumbeat that reinforces these cultural tenets, or it becomes the river that erodes them week after week.

Click here to read Part 2 about specifics details of how you could implement an operations review.