That last 1%: from good to great

“Hey Ed, did you use Mark’s new automation for last night’s sev-2 ticket? Mark said his project can remove all the manual steps. Did it work?”, I was checking in with Ed who is oncall this week.

“Ah. I didn’t know Mark has shipped his project… was there an announcement I missed?”, Ed said.

“Let me check.” I looked at my email inbox, “Yeah, Mark sort of said it in his project status update yesterday. I guess you didn’t read the whole email, most of us didn’t.”

“Yeah, my bad. I will try it next time we have a similar problem.” Ed said.

Two days later, another sev-2.

“Did the automation work this time?”, I asked the next morning.

“Yeah. It did. Mark put an automated comment in the ticket with his runbook link. I followed the runbook. It was just one command I needed to run at the end. Good stuff.” Ed said.

“Anything you think we can do better for this automation?”

“Yes. I wish i don’t have to read the runbook just to construct a command. Instead of pasting the runbook link in the ticket, why not automatically construct and put the command I need to run on the ticket, so I can copy and paste. That would have saved me at least 10 minutes in the middle of the night.” Ed said.

“Great idea! Why don’t you tell Mark about this.”, Ed passed on the proposal to Mark in their stand up.

Mark was a junior engineer who joined the team recently.

“Anything you have learned from this interaction with Ed?”, I asked in my 1-on-1 with Mark.

“Yeah, I could have followed up with Ed to ask his feedbacks on using my automation, or if he has used my automation at all. He didn’t know I completed that already. I love his idea to automate the command construction in the ticket. ”, Mark said.

“That is right on.” I exclaimed, “Shipping your work to production is just 99% of your delivering result, it is not done yet. You wanna make sure your customers - in this case oncall engineers - can truly benefit from your work through clear communication. If they don’t know you have completed your work or how to use your work, then if doesn’t matter how good your work is. If you could automate their whole action into one command that they can just copy and paste, don’t ask them to read a lengthy runbook. Nobody wants to read a runbook in the middle of the night. Don’t ask your customers to think if you can avoid it!

The last 1% of the work - making sure your customers are really delighted by your delivery; making sure the user experience is as simple as possible - is what Customer Obsession is all about.

The 99% is good work. But it takes the last 1% to make it a GREAT work.

Don’t be complacent with being good, be GREAT, be extraordinary!”

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