August 27, 2023
To Whom It May Concern:
I recommend Kent Beck for a position with your firm. In the past 3 years he helped us scale our engineering, product, design, and data organization in size and effectiveness. Now that the time has come for him to move on, I believe he could bring the same benefits to you and your company.
Kent introduced himself to us as a “Productive Irritant”. He was not kidding. Working with Kent is not always comfortable, but he stirred things that needed stirring everywhere in the organization from the shop floor to the board room. Once we paired him up with executors his ideas and energy turned into action.
Some of his accomplishments:
- Process. Kent helped our engineering, product, and design leaders see and improve our product development process as a complex system. Serious incidents fell 92% in the past 3 years. System changes go into production in a tenth the time. Pioneer customers offer quick feedback for product decisions.
- Coaching. Senior developers, promising junior developers, managers, and executives all benefited from working intensively with Kent on story-telling, leadership, and communication. He scaled coaching by forming a coaching community.
- Scaling. Kent helped restructure our performance review process to better align individual, team, and corporate incentives.
- Leadership. In leadership team meetings Kent sharpened our storytelling, asked challenging questions, and reminded us to change one thing at a time. His perspective was always unique. Not always applicable, but always unique.
- Published “Faceplant: How Facebook Won and We All Lost”. Controversial on its release, this book proved prescient about the societal risks of giant technology companies structurally incapable of seeing the potential downside of their decisions.
- Published “Tidy First?: An Empirical Practice of Software Design”. Returning to his geeky audience, this book reintroduced coupling and cohesion to a new generation of developers.
Kent truly is, as one colleague put it, the Rick Rubin of software development. His presence encourages everyone to bring their best selves to work. “With my shareholder hat on…” Kent must use this phrase a hundred times a day, reminding everyone they are ultimately on the same team. Kent will help you scale and succeed and, eventually, like it.
Sincerely yours,
Definitely Not Kent Beck
