No Matter Where You Go...

[midiamin]

eng: I have another change to push to production.
me: This fixes the problem you were working on earlier?
eng: Yeah.
me: You checked it into the current release branch?
eng: Yeah.
me: And you tested it?
eng: Yeah.
me: Why didn't this problem show up when you tested the earlier change?
eng: Oh, because I pushed the change into the

Comments

[dustgrl]

There does though need to be balance. What I have found in the world of early startups is that opportunity cost is a cruel mistress. Everyday I am asked to balance what can scale, be supported, be reasonably certain of solving most cases of the problem versus the need to show something to investors, potential clients, etc that could get us money and useful business deals. Add to this that the interest of a partner or investor is incredibly fickle. They are interested now or never.

There is a big difference between how one can run a post launch versus a pre launch company. While I agree there is much to be said for an almost religious devotion to process, I disagree that right now is the time to dig in our heels over it. If a demo fails and a major deal falls through the CEO will not ask, “but was our faith pure?” The thing senior people are hired for isn’t ability, it is judgment. The ability to say, “the opportunity right now is worth bending a rule for and I do have the discipline not to make this my default behavior.”

Juggling that horrible problem is what it all comes down to. For operations more than the rest of the company the challenge at an early startup is to build a process and system that can scale while at the same time managing to somehow figure out a way to skate around rules and procedures when needed to make the key demos and presentations actually happen. All of this on whatever random timeline outside forces dictate to us. To add chainsaws to the tap dancing ops will of course be asked to do this in the face of tense senior management flying off the handle asking, “why can’t this one simple thing just be done?”