No excuse for bad engineering

“I feel my org’s process is so waterfall: we just plan out what we do at the beginning of the year and we launch one feature after another, without knowing how customers are responding to them … Aren’t we supposed to be agile?”, said a SDM.

He is one of my mentees. We have monthly 1-on-1 to talk about things.

“Really? It does not sound like a waterfall vs. agile problem, rather it is a working backwards and Customer Obsession problem! Why can’t you collect data about customer experience on your features?” I wondered.

“Ah, we are a new service, we don’t have enough customers yet.” He sighed. “But how do I keep my team and myself motivated when we don’t have customers yet?”

“Well … here is the thing.”

When we build a new product, trying out a new idea, just like when we launch a startup company, there is no guarantee we are building the right product, for the right people, or at the right time.

Maybe we are working on a wrong product, maybe we are launching a wrong feature, maybe we launch it too early, too late ... imagine you had an idea to launch touch screen smart phones in 1995 instead of 2007? Brilliant idea, but it would be destined to fail. 50-90% of the startup ideas will fail. 75% of the venture backed startups in US can't give the money back to their investors. They do not stop us from taking risks and trying.

But there is one thing we can control as software development team: engineering. No matter the product succeeds or fails, we can always practice good engineering disciplines, there is no excuse for bad engineering. As long as we do that, we can get something good out of the worK, at least good lessons.

In the mid-1980s, Steve Jobs founded a company called NeXT, with the goal of creating a high-performance computer for the education and business markets. The NeXT computer was designed to be innovative and powerful, featuring advanced hardware and software that was years ahead of its time. However, despite its cutting-edge technology, NeXT struggled to make a profit and was ultimately forced to pivot to other business ventures, such as software development. Fast forward to the late 1990s, and Steve Jobs had returned to Apple as CEO, determined to revitalize the struggling company. One of his first moves was to acquire NeXT for its software technology, which included the NeXTSTEP operating system and the Objective-C programming language. The result was iOS, the operating system that powers Apple's iPhone, iPad, and other mobile devices.

The moral of the story: while NeXT may have been a failure as a high-performance computer product, its engineering innovations ultimately made we now known as Apple possible.

There is no excuse for bad engineering!