Developers are superheroes, but they need saving too
My team have recently finished crafting our MVP product for a very special audience… *developers* 🏆. Our product is built by developers, for developers, combining practices like infrastructure as code, pipelines as code, microservice/microfrontend scaffolds/starter kits, reusable SDKs, information radiation, and containerisation. Developer experience is the new differentiator, right?
We had a kickass team of developers and designers across the stack who have all worked together previously, so we had awesome harmony and trust across the team. We were a truly empowered, self managing team, doing away the need for a ScrumMaster. We selected everything from cloud tech, tooling (based on developer research in our organisation), where/how we did our retros (#retro-breakfast), and even to the extent where we were using our own credit card to get stuff moving, fast!…
…Meaning that we could also try some techniques like mob programming — at the start of a design sprint to path find as a unit, so that everyone was on the same page before splitting out for efficiency.
We also paired on everything, from design thinking, to backlog grooming, to architecture and design, to defining automated test cases, to making decisions, to creating microservice scaffolds, to creating self healing cloud infra and networking from code, to crafting rich .io docs in markdown, etc.
This was immense, always having two or more involved in everything we did, giving us consensus on our hills/outcomes, and architecture and design, which was all around us on the walls and in our heads, rather than hidden away in lengthy documentation.
Amongst raising product quality, and eliminating single pockets of knowledge, we also had the benefits of sharing skills and knowledge across the team, cross pollinating depth — investing in each other along the way of our journey to deliver an exceptional experience for fellow developers.
Hopefully the product we’ve crafted surpasses our hills/outcomes (currently in private beta). If it does there’s a risk we’ll do ourselves out of a job! :-)
A few of us were recently invited to present at a tech conference in Vegas, and we naturally started to pair on stuff outside of the office — things like pairing to craft presentations as code at the airport using RevealJS (with CD pipeline as standard), demo’ing the concept to others — being able to bounce off each other and keep our presentation energetic, and even activities in the evenings!
Thought provoker: can you apply the concept of pairing to anything else you do outside of work to improve longterm efficiency and value?
