Week of 2021-07-26
Rock tumbler teams
Growing a well-used platform developer surface is exceptionally tricky work. I’ve heard many stories of the team investing months (or years) into building a new set of APIs or protocols, only to encounter at best lackluster interest. To arrive at a more effective outcome, a practice that I’ve seen (and applied myself) is rock tumbler teams.
Rock tumbler teams start using the new stuff before it’s ready. They become the early consumers of a not-yet ready developer surface, providing continuous feedback to the makers of this surface. Ideally, they do this as part of some broader mandate, and have some skin in the game: they aren’t just prototyping and building interesting demos. Their mission is a composite of questing and scaling: they are to both build something useful and to improve the developer surface they consume.
One thing I’ve learned is that it’s important to set these expectations. A few of my attempts to apply this practice ended up in additional suffering because I either didn’t cogently describe the rock tumbler (“here’s what you’re getting into”) or didn’t continue reinforcing it over time (“don’t forget, y’all are rock tumblers”) I remember one TL cornering me in the hallway: “This crap’s not ready! Why are you selling it to me? Not cool.” I may have been overly optimistic describing the benefits of that particular crap and skimmed over the whole “you’re eating unbaked cookies” bit.
Thriving in a rock tumbler team tends to require a mindset of exploration and change. The work will feel painful, with frequent backtracking and changing direction. A leader of such a team typically builds a strong narrative around the value of the composite mission: “we’re eating unbaked cookies so that when they are ready, they are truly amazing.”
A common pitfall that I’ve seen here is the assumption that every team can be a rock tumbler team, possibly stemming from extending the practice of “dogfooding” to developer surfaces. In my experience, this tends to not end well -- the additional pain of implicit rock tumbling causes teams to work around the rough edges they find, including choosing to “screw it, we’ll just build our own.”
🔗 https://glazkov.com/2021/07/30/rock-tumbler-teams/
Why will this be hard for us?
I was working on a strategy and helping review another this week, and found this framing helpful. Especially in mature organizations, the challenge tends to reside not in determining how to do something, but rather in finding what makes this “how” difficult for this organization.
The common symptom here is dust-covered stacks of past plans that look eerily familiar to what is being proposed. There’s a certain Groundhog Day quality to these. “Oh, we’re pitching this thing again? Okay, I guess it's been a few years since we last tried it.” The “it” might range from product ideas to processes and practices. Having cross-functional communication issues? Let’s start an XFN working group. This time around, it’s sure to bear fruit, right?
Putting our systems thinking hat on, we can see that well-established orgs are held together by forces that animate them. The dynamic equilibrium of these forces tends to also preserve the status quo: the plans that failed will likely fail again in similar ways, if tried once over. Think of it as a cousin of procrastination: just like with us humans, the actual challenge might not be the work itself, but rather the inner organizational tensions and conflicts that make doing that work next to impossible.
A useful shift here might be to focus on why, given these animating forces, we are to expect a different outcome. What’s changed about the situation? How did forces change and in what way since our last attempt? The generative question that tends to help is “why will this be hard for this particular team or organization?”
A word of caution: it’s easy to land on despair when looking into what animates an organization. Discerning and reflecting on team pathologies asks for heaps of patience and compassion. Perhaps this is why we often fall back just rolling the dice again.