Turning a failure or a difficulty into a success: a real case at BestSecret
Probably you have asked yourself at some point things like:
Is what I’m doing fine enough for my company?
Am I sure about what I’m doing is on the right direction?
Can I pass a particular difficulty?
Can I be fired if I make a mistake?
We are normally afraid of making failures or not being able to get over a difficulty. But the failure is in fact that thought.
You might think that the previous sentence is easy to say but impossible to introduce into a company. Well, what if… I show you a real case at BestSecret?
Driving a company towards failures and difficulties
Imagine a person who was a professional runner and he has just had the misfortune of losing a leg and sees no way out could acquire, beyond feeling like an unfortunate person and who cannot do anything to walk again as before (imagine about running). This person will possibly close in on negative thoughts that could even lead to anxiety and depression. In other words, he can lose part of his soul.
Now imagine a company that has a solvent, operational and well-positioned product in the market. For this company, any failure will mean losses and could compromise its position with respect to its competitors. Then, the company has a unexpected difficulty which ends on some mistakes and losing the current leadership position. This company could fall into the same mindset than the runner and even into the dynamic of evaluating its employees based on the number of mistakes they make on a daily basis. This way of working would have a direct impact on the workflow and the participation of all workers:
Who is going to want to give their opinion on a controversial topic?
Who is going to question other opinions with the risk of being wrong?
Who is going to want to innovate with new technologies?
Who is going to give it a try to AI or AR/VR if we might fail?
Who is going to be the brave one to take the reins of the most complex and difficult developments?
All those questions and many more will end up on a bigger issue: a company without a soul. As the runner.
As soon as the company enters this dynamic, employees will go from an active role to a much more passive one where they only seek to survive to the failure and approach those simpler developments instead of those that involve greater challenges. Therefore, the company will stop moving forward, remaining stuck in a reality from which it is scary to move on because of the fear of failure and the company won’t pass ever the difficulties which actually introduced the mistakes and the troubles. That company will end up on a downfall.
Driving a company towards learnings and opportunities: The ‘What if…’ mindset
Coming back to the previous runner, now let’s imagine that he is a professional athlete who has worked both physically and mentally. When he has the accident that causes him to lose his leg, he now works not only to walk again but begins to think about what doors can be opened (not just complaining about the ones that are now closed): ‘What if…’ will be the most frequent words on his mind. He will possibly end up being a professional runner in the Paralympic Games and being an example for thousands of people thanks to how he overcomes adversity. His life will have no similarities with the previous case. And he had the same misfortune…
Let’s go back to the company we mentioned before but rethinking on a ‘what if…’ mindset like the second runner:
What if… we do a research on AI to introduce it into our product?
What if… we give it a try to AR/VR for looking for new markets?
What if… we introduce this new technology?
In this case, instead of avoiding making mistakes we try to find options that allow us to take the product to a better level. If we promote innovation, it will be much more possible to measure the success of the company by the number of improvements we make instead of by the number of mistakes we make.
Then, for the question:
What if… we fail?
The natural answer will be:
We do learn about the process and we focus on new opportunities.
Have you considered what an incredible power is coming with just the ‘what if..’ mindset? These two words are just giving all options to the employees. And they will feel safe because the are not afraid of failing because the important thing is not the failure, but the option of success.
The BestSecret case: a Backend For Frontend (BFF) for apps
At BestSecret, we do care about our Android & iOS apps as one of the most important products we can offer to our customers. And we are constantly thinking how to improve it and how to present more and more interesting information through our screens. That behaviour ends up on many different calls which needed to be handled at the client, ending on over complexity in both clients.
At some point, we considered that introducing a Backend For Frontend (BFF) will simplify a lot the complexity as all the synchronisation will be happening in only one single place. And it works…
It works… until we noticed that the apps engineers weren’t feeling so comfortable about maintaining a cloud application. We also introduced a BFF for web which came with questions like: Why iOS and Android can share a BFF but web is having its own? Are the clients really so different? Are we duplicating things?
After some time with the apps BFF working in production, we agreed on removing it. YES, removing it.
If you think like the first runner or the first company, you will have thoughts like:
What a failure!
Are really the engineers and the architects taking good decision?
Should we fire them?
We are taking steps back!
We just lost a precious time!
If we decided to have a BFF, we should keep it!
But in BestSecret we are like the second runner and the second company. That’s the reason we were having this other thoughts:
What if… we don’t really need the BFF if we do have GraphQL services?
What if… we get rid of the BFF after experimenting with it as we can see more cons (maintenance, duplicity…) than pros?
What if… we use all the GraphQL knowledge we have acquired to move our services into this new technology?
We never thought we failed there. In fact, during the BFF lifetime we have learned a lot about GraphQL, Federated schemas, engineers are more awared about what a frontend model or a domain model is and their differences, we have provided to apps engineers a minimum knowledge about how a cloud app works… But not only that: now we are moving all our stack into GraphQL services. The outcome from the process of having a BFF is still bringing us value.
So, if you ask me as the apps architect for BestSecret, I can tell you that I see our movement to introducing and removing the BFF as a success. If I can go to the past I would repeat it. And most important I’m glad to work for a company which gives us the options to iterate, innovate and improve without thinking on failures, because you know:
We can always convert a failure or a difficulty into a success via the ‘What if…’ mindset.
And you, are you like the first or the second runner?
