A Business is Like a Rope

Brooks Patton — Thu, 26 Sep 2019 01:23:46 +0000

When I first decided to go about the holistically learning the full-stack of businesses journey I reached out to one of my mentors that have made this journey before me. He gave me a metaphor for how products, and also businesses work that surprised me. Instead of the classic Business is like a house, it needs a good foundation he used Business is like a rope.

Let's take an aspect of business that many people focus on, the technical excellence of the product (in this case I'm focusing on software products). If the product or service isn't good, then snip, the rope is cut and it doesn't matter what comes after it. However because its a rope, a new rope can be tied on and we can try again. Maybe our product crashed constantly and corrupted data. We can tie on a new rope by fixing the bugs, creating a CI/CD pipeline to prevent them from occurring in the future, and of course, refusing to deploy when we know it will be a bad experience. The point is that when there is a problem and the rope is cut, we can't tie the next rope on until we fix the problem we are having.

This should make sense, it feels logical to me. However, my mentor continued to state that a common problem he sees, and I agree with, is that decision-makers in the company focus on areas of the rope that aren't their domain when there is a problem. The quality of the code-base doesn't matter if the rope was cut hight up the chain?

For example,

the product designers didn't interview potential clients and development created the wrong application? snip
the market shifted and now our customers want something similar, but not exactly what we provide? snip
There never was any market research and so the company built something that nobody was looking for? nothing to cut, the rope has been in freefall this entire time!

Why is this? My mentor's opinion is that many businesses culture is of my life is over if I'm wrong. Of course, if we cannot be wrong because we'll be fired then we cannot do anything other than defend our decisions...even if we know they are wrong.

To prevent this I am beginning my rope building adventure by practicing on myself. I'll be searching for the perfect place to put the eye bolt which the first section of rope will be tied to later. My mentor recommended the book The Lean Startup by Eric Ries to find where that eyebolt should be placed. From what I understand the plan will be to screw in the bolt to random metaphorical boards until one seems to hold.

This is the second article (you can find the introduction here about business here, are any of you interested in me continuing this series on Dev.to? Let me know with a comment. I plan to continue the adventure regardless but I also want to make sure I'm not adding noise where no-one is listening.

What Business Does a Dev Have in Business?

Brooks Patton — Sun, 22 Sep 2019 22:01:44 +0000

I've recently taken to thinking about leadership, businesses, and why many of them fail. And having finished the Phoenix Project novel about applying a more holistic approach to business towards an IT department I began wondering how to go about creating the utopia that the book seems to end with. If you haven't read The Phoenix Project, I highly recommend it, but if you want the TLDR version, here is a long sentence that doesn't give anything away.

The Phoenix Project is a fictional / how to hybrid novel describing how a company with a deeply flawed culture gap between IT, engineering, and the rest of the company can change how they work and in turn take a failing company to a wildly successful company in a very short time.

Of course, I want to work at a company that sees and treats the engineering department more than just a machine that produces the products that make money. Engineers are a clever bunch, we creatively solve difficult problems for a living. I believe that we could provide so much more value if we were invited to help solve some of the business problems rather than just a room full of MBA's.

Of course, that's crazy talk, right? Why would we want to step outside of engineering and into the political waters of the C-Suite?

For one, we might be able to fix the toxic culture that has developers and designers switching jobs every year or two. We might even be able to help more companies survive and thrive in an ever-changing marketplace. We might even build the right product for the customers and change people's lives.

I've seen far too many companies where danger is approaching, but the direction the company is looking is everywhere but that dark, stormy cloud. What is especially infuriating to me is that oftentimes (every time in my personal experience) the boots on the ground employees see the darkness coming, and even have really good suggestions that go unheard or worse, punished.

This is why I want to learn the full-stack of business so that I can have a holistic view, speak the language of every team, and hopefully, help some amazing companies succeed and do good to their clients and employees at the same time.

DEV Community: Denver Devs

A Business is Like a Rope

What Business Does a Dev Have in Business?