16 min
Overcome Attachment: Discover the Mindset for Lean Software Development Healthy Software Developer
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- Technology
Are you trying to get other people to use agile or lean software development methods, but they can’t seem to break out of the mindset they’re stuck in? Today I’d like to offer some strategies to overcome attachment.
Building What Customers Want Takes Failure And Learning Traditional management at many companies focus on predictability. They want to know how long things will take, and how much they will cost. Unfortunately if your software company wants to be innovative, you may already know that you can’t measure performance this way.
If you want to deliver truly disruptive and valuable ideas to your customers, you need to experiment and make small investments to see how customers receive them.
Establishing the Mindset for Failure and Learning I talk often about how important experiments are to the success of your software company, and how you can sell and introduce the changes needed to work this way to leadership and other stakeholders.
Assume for a moment you’ve already convinced people of the benefits of lean software development methods that let your company experiment (DevOps, Continuous Delivery, Lean Startup techniques etc.).
Yes, people now understand the mechanics of these approaches. But it can be frustrating at first to help others have the courage to take risks and actually experiment.
This is because experimenting and then learning from the results, often requires failure.
The Uncertainty of Innovation Can Cause Anxiety One of the technology capabilities I have said in other articles is crucial to a company sustainably releasing valuable software, is Continuous Delivery. This lets your team release your software to customers as frequently as multiple times per day.
If you’re going to let the customer take a larger role in deciding what’s in your product, and release it multiple times per day — you’ll have an increased set of feedback.
Also subject matter experts like Product Managers will find out their ideas aren’t as valuable as they’d hoped when trying new things.
These two changes alone introduce data-href="https://medium.com/jayme-edwards-mentoring/how-uncertainty-impacts-software-development-processes-9d7d7cefe5c6">uncertainty that needs to be handled with care. Without addressing this, your team will start blaming each other and going back to what they’re comfortable with when their first few experiments don’t produce the results they anticipated.
Overcoming Attachment to Enable Learning If you celebrate Christmas or your Birthday, you’ve probably experienced being attached to a gift or outcome you wanted as a child.
You and your team need to overcome these feelings of attachment at your company to use lean and agile methods for developing software. Without detaching from outcomes, people will feel threatened when things change.
We Must Be Comfortable With Uncertainty to Take Risks The more comfortable you can be with trying things and not being able to guarantee that the outcome is something that you want, the more you can take risks. This is exactly the mindset needed to be more innovative with software development.
Strategies for Practicing Detachment Since you know people need to be more comfortable with uncertainty, and they need to be less attached to outcomes — what are some strategies you can use to cope with this?
Thinking About the Possibility of Other Outcomes Most people in corporate America don’t want to do this. Typical work structures are all about certainty and planning for outcomes we expect.
Instead, thinking about the possibility that what you’ve planned might not work out ahead of time primes you for a healthy mindset for taking risk.
When you’re working with a team to experiment, remind them at every opportunity that everyone is looking forward to seeing the data to help them steer the product in the right direction.
If the data behind a release shows that a change wasn’t positive, that is not a failure
Are you trying to get other people to use agile or lean software development methods, but they can’t seem to break out of the mindset they’re stuck in? Today I’d like to offer some strategies to overcome attachment.
Building What Customers Want Takes Failure And Learning Traditional management at many companies focus on predictability. They want to know how long things will take, and how much they will cost. Unfortunately if your software company wants to be innovative, you may already know that you can’t measure performance this way.
If you want to deliver truly disruptive and valuable ideas to your customers, you need to experiment and make small investments to see how customers receive them.
Establishing the Mindset for Failure and Learning I talk often about how important experiments are to the success of your software company, and how you can sell and introduce the changes needed to work this way to leadership and other stakeholders.
Assume for a moment you’ve already convinced people of the benefits of lean software development methods that let your company experiment (DevOps, Continuous Delivery, Lean Startup techniques etc.).
Yes, people now understand the mechanics of these approaches. But it can be frustrating at first to help others have the courage to take risks and actually experiment.
This is because experimenting and then learning from the results, often requires failure.
The Uncertainty of Innovation Can Cause Anxiety One of the technology capabilities I have said in other articles is crucial to a company sustainably releasing valuable software, is Continuous Delivery. This lets your team release your software to customers as frequently as multiple times per day.
If you’re going to let the customer take a larger role in deciding what’s in your product, and release it multiple times per day — you’ll have an increased set of feedback.
Also subject matter experts like Product Managers will find out their ideas aren’t as valuable as they’d hoped when trying new things.
These two changes alone introduce data-href="https://medium.com/jayme-edwards-mentoring/how-uncertainty-impacts-software-development-processes-9d7d7cefe5c6">uncertainty that needs to be handled with care. Without addressing this, your team will start blaming each other and going back to what they’re comfortable with when their first few experiments don’t produce the results they anticipated.
Overcoming Attachment to Enable Learning If you celebrate Christmas or your Birthday, you’ve probably experienced being attached to a gift or outcome you wanted as a child.
You and your team need to overcome these feelings of attachment at your company to use lean and agile methods for developing software. Without detaching from outcomes, people will feel threatened when things change.
We Must Be Comfortable With Uncertainty to Take Risks The more comfortable you can be with trying things and not being able to guarantee that the outcome is something that you want, the more you can take risks. This is exactly the mindset needed to be more innovative with software development.
Strategies for Practicing Detachment Since you know people need to be more comfortable with uncertainty, and they need to be less attached to outcomes — what are some strategies you can use to cope with this?
Thinking About the Possibility of Other Outcomes Most people in corporate America don’t want to do this. Typical work structures are all about certainty and planning for outcomes we expect.
Instead, thinking about the possibility that what you’ve planned might not work out ahead of time primes you for a healthy mindset for taking risk.
When you’re working with a team to experiment, remind them at every opportunity that everyone is looking forward to seeing the data to help them steer the product in the right direction.
If the data behind a release shows that a change wasn’t positive, that is not a failure
16 min