A passion for software and culture
There are two things that currently motivate me, a strong dislike of terrible software and a passion for creating generative organizational cultures. Over the years I have had the privilege and luck to work on some amazing software in some organizations with remarkable cultures. In this current chapter of my life I’m interested in connecting with teams that are looking to improve the software they deliver while actively creating generative cultures.
Better Software
I realize that ‘better’ is subject to interpretation. So, allow me to provide a brief definition and rubric that I use to assess software and another for culture. To build better software I believe that it starts with measuring the value to the user. Ideally, software enables a user to accomplish a task more quickly and with greater joy than if they were to attempt the same task without the software. While this may seem like a low expectation, I assure you accomplishing this consistently is hard.
One of the greatest challenges is the requirement that we put on software to continually improve. This need for better performance, more features, and greater joy for the users is relentless. Interestingly, the organizations that have learned to do this well perform well on a number of core metrics. We know this thanks to the incredible work of Dr. Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble, Gene Kim, and the rest of the team at DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA). The rigor they brought to the ‘State of DevOps report’ in 2014 changed the way folks thought about software development metrics . At this point there is general consensus amongst practitioners that the core metrics identified in this report are remarkable predictors of a software delivery organization’s ability to deliver more performant and stable software. For those that are not familiar with DORA the core metrics are:
- Deployment Frequency — How often an organization successfully releases to production
- Lead Time for Changes — The amount of time it takes a commit to get into production
- Change Failure Rate — The percentage of deployments causing a failure in production
- Time to Restore Service — How long it takes an organization to recover from a failure in production
As for user joy, net promoter score (or NPS) continues to be the best leading indicator. NPS can also be evaluated alongside net dollar retention (NDR) for B2B companies and daily/monthly active user (D/MAU) for B2C companies to gain a more complete understanding.
Progressive Improvements
Learning from the teams that have used these metrics to recognize success, I’ve spent the past 5 years helping teams adopt Progressive Delivery as a new software development model. This model aligns the ability to deliver more performant software with the joy and value perceived by the customer. For those familiar with models for the software development life cycle (SDLC), Progressive Delivery is the natural evolution of Continuous Delivery driven by an increased standardization towards a cloud-based Software as a Service (SaaS) model. The two key enhancements with Progressive Delivery are:
Release progression — progressively increasing the number of users that are able to see (or are impacted by) new features.
Delegation — progressively delegating the control of the feature to the owner that is most closely responsible for the outcome.
I’m currently working with James Governor and Kimberly Harrison on a book covering this model.
People are the hard part
On the culture side, there are two individuals that I regularly credit with my passion for culture. The first is Dr. Ron Westrum, for his work and definitions of the types of cultures in organizations. The second is Jocelyn Goldfein, for a wonderful blog post on culture, which I reference regularly. The work from Dr. Westrum is deeply incorporated into the DORA metrics when looking at organizational culture. I had the opportunity to meet Dr. Westrum through my work with Gene Kim and the DevOps Enterprise community. I also had the pleasure of working with Jocelyn early in our careers at VMware.
In both cases, the value that I have gotten from these individuals lies in the eloquence they have distilled from their experience. And in the case of Dr. Westrum, over 30 years of academic research. Dr. Westrum has been able to reduce the types of culture down to three types:
With these behaviors in mind, we can start to understand how the culture of a community or organization formed. Jocelyn makes this very point with a quote she shares in her blog post:
“That’s your culture. Your culture is the behaviors you reward and punish.”
- Charles O’Reilly, Stanford GSB
I like to think of this as expressed as an equation:
Simple, right? Turns out the most complicated part about building software is not the technology or the process, it’s the people. And I find people fascinating.
So, what’s next?
Over the past 10 years I served as an Advisor to over 15 companies including Shape Security (acquired by F5), Lightstep (acquired by ServiceNow), Turbine Labs (acquired by Slack), Buddybuild (acquired by Apple), Weaveworks, Kong, Sourcegraph, CODE2040, /dev/color, and others. The engagements always fall into these two areas of interest, building better software that enables the success of customers and building better leaders that enables the success of their teams.
The consulting names for these activities are typically GTM (or go-to-market) and executive coaching. GTM spans across Product Management, Marketing, Sales, and Customer Success. All of these functions and roles contribute to enabling the success of the customer. It also happened that I have held positions in each of these job functions. The executive coaching engagements are more focused on enabling better leadership practices. Too often in our industry, folks in management roles have never been trained as leaders. This often leads to problematic behaviors being rewarded and praised and behaviors that support psychological safety are discouraged or shunned. I believe that the job of a leader is to enable the success of others. By working with executives to view leadership through this lens I’ve been able to help teams adopt practices leading to more positive cultures.
This past year I’ve begun to expand the reach of my advising by working with early-stage VC firms that share my passion for building both great products and great cultures. Last fall I was excited to start work with Zetta Venture Partners as an Advisor-in-Residence and Vertex Ventures as a Vertex Fellow. These roles allow me to meet new start-ups to advise in building better software and remarkable cultures. It is also a tremendous opportunity for me to engage in my own personal growth to learn more about the current trends in applied AI and ML applications. I look forward to working with members of the portfolios and welcome folks that are interested in better software and culture to reachout on twitter or linkedin.
