Yesterday’s Cool, Today’s Lean
From the eighties until a few years ago, through the PC, Dot-Com, and Web 2.0 bubbles, we had a very definite idea of what a cool startup looked like. Flexible hours, telecommuting, space for individual creativity, sometimes geographically distributed, maybe even worldwide. Let’s not get too romantic though, it was not all magic and rainbows; there was also working 200 hours a week, code being written by individuals isolated for weeks and the corresponding integration nightmares, and, despite all that freedom, lots and lots of stress and burnout.
Then Agile and Lean happened. Coming from the corporate world, in the mid-2000s they started to spread through the startup world, and suddenly it was all pair programming, TDD, user stories, backlogs, and of course, daily stand-ups. Unfortunately, the “sustainable pace” part didn’t spread quite as fast, and neither did the idea of self-organizing teams or continuous improvement.
Cue to 2015, and the story is far from over. There’s still a whole camp of waking up whenever, working from coworking spaces, or from home in your pyjamas, individual creativity, hiring people on the other side of the planet, and telling everyone how much you love it.
This model is especially common among earlier-stage startups, when the team is not yet so large, the pressures from the business side not yet so heavy, and everybody is deeply committed to the vision.
And some startups try to mix the two cultures. Self-organization and continuous improvement would seem to synergize with the personal freedom prized by the old culture. Flexible work hours and/or telecommuting are even better when throttled by sustainable pace rules. Test-first (be it TDD, BDD, or both) makes it easier for the colleagues on the other side of the world to understand each other’s code and avoid breaking it. Pull requests make for great code review, and continuous integration kills “hermit development”. Some even go as far as adopting user stories, backlogs, and digital agile boards.
But how do I do daily stand-ups when my team works in different hours, some in a cafe or coworking space, some in a different country and timezone? How do I actually implement our continuous improvement ideas without curbing team members’ personal and creative freedom? How do I work with a backlog and/or kanban board when I have a team of five, possibly with wildly different expertises, working on seven different projects at the same time? And on the other end of the spectrum, if I have a larger company, proper cross-functional agile teams, and a product with some traction already, how do I keep the team members committed to and motivated about the vision, and how do I get new hires there in the first place?
Oh, and the hiring can of worms… how do I find the unicorn wizard rock stars that will fit my wonderful unique little workshop of magic, and once I do, how do I make sure they do exactly what I want? (A vegan, gluten-free cookie for you if you found at least three problems with the previous sentence.)
If you’re looking for proven, mature, reliable, silver-bullet answer to those questions, look elsewhere. Spoiler: they don’t exist.
However, I worked in or with a number of startups that faced these and other problems, and I talked about them with many, many more. Being nocturnal and a bit of a nomad, they are of a very personal interest to me. So I started this publication to share my thoughts and experiences on the topic. There will be discussions of the problems, solutions that were tried — along with the respective results, and a lot of ideas that are still just that.
Furthermore, I’d like to encourage any readers to participate, sharing their own experiences; either in a reply post, or, if you prefer more anonymity, by getting in touch with me privately.
I’ve seen all these problems solved at least once, although, of course, not all in the same organization. So I believe they’re solvable. I believe an environment that puts it all together can be created. And I invite you to join me in the road to it.
