12/30/2023 0 Comments Easy ghost of christmas past drawing![]() Sometimes these bad incentives can be traced to the business model itself. This leads to all manner of chaos and arguments at worst, or ineffective work at best. The problems stem from the fact that people have different motivators, and sometimes there are different types of incentives set up for different sets of people within an organization. Sometimes these are tangible, and sometimes they are less so. ![]() Incentives are what drive people to work. The Ghost of Christmas Present - Bad Incentivesīad incentives are at the core of just about every disagreement and dysfunction you can find in an organization. ![]() But for some product people, the ghost of Christmas present is creeping around the corner. Now listen, dear readers, as there are still two ghosts to come.Īs Christmas approaches, the joy jingles in the air. Your ghost of Christmas past might seem scary now, but tech debt can be banished and kept at bay. Tackling tech debt means measuring and acknowledging what you have already, and carving out enough time to pay down the existing problems, while improving processes so that new debt doesn't rack up in the meantime. This usually translates into giving some sort of percentage of time towards bug and code maintenance. In practice, this means giving the engineering team some extra slack to dive into problem areas and untangle old code that was previously rushed out the door to make it more stable and reusable. If your company aspires to have a product that’s stable and maintainable, and a team that releases frequently and smoothly, you’ll need to make tackling tech debt a strategic objective, and bake it into your new years plans. Once you’ve cornered one of the main sources of tech debt, you’ve got to make it part of your plan to pay it off. No more building up of the cobwebs in the corner. No more deadline crunches that force our developers to trade off quality, time and time again. To banish tech debt, you need to look it in the eye, and say ' no more'. ![]() This pattern is doomed to repeat itself, like a ghost from the past, echoing around the hallways. Over time, your codebase has racked up so much tech debt it needs a full refactor, and your developers have all left for greener pastures. Crunch after crunch like this stacks up tech debt, and it also stresses out your developers, who never get a chance to build to the quality they perceive as good, and never get a breather. Very often, these are things that aren’t even flagged, and so the project is marked as complete, and work moves on to the next thing, where there’s inevitably another deadline crunch coming. Oftentimes, the missing quality is ‘just’ that the code isn’t as elegant or scalable or reusable as it could have been, or that documentation, tests, or commenting is left out. After all, it’s the more visible of the criteria, and it’s what the end clients and other stakeholders see. That deadline crunch puts pressure on the developer, and if they’re given a hard choice between making it look like it meets all the criteria (scope ✅) versus making it work as well as it really should (quality ✅), scope usually wins out. Scope creeps and procrastination always happens, purely by nature. Parkinson’s Law, which everyone’s very familiar with at least in concept, if not by name, states that work always expands to fill the time given. We give a fixed amount of time for an engineering job to be done, and set expectations on the scope and acceptance criteria.īecause time is fickle and hard to estimate, we’re always up against a deadline crunch. Now, this might seem obvious to anyone with a shred of financial sense, yet it’s often the status quo for how we run our development teams. But like financial debt, it gets out of hand if you keep stacking it up and never making the effort to pay it off. It’s a fact of life, and you’re always going to have some. Tech debt is like any other sort of debt, even financial debt. The first ghost of Christmas to visit is a ghost from the past: your insidious, shadowy tech debt. Each one comes with a cautionary tale as we enter the new year, and having banished our own ghosts here at ProdPad, we come with tips on how you can banish yours! But for many product people out there, the three ghosts of Christmas past, present, and future are coming to visit. As we approach Christmas, teams everywhere are getting into the festive feeling.
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