What's up, my friend? What pops into your mind when you think of delivering value?
This is a topic that made me think for a long time and still does today. Mostly because it throws me out of my comfort zone. Often I get myself wondering about the reasons that I do things the way I do.
Let me clarify. As a programmer, I need to carry about code quality, docs, if I'm keeping things simple, if I'm repeating code, if I'm writing in the best way possible, and so on. In general, that's good, however, sometimes, it can be a problem. I need to remember frequently that those details little or nothing will bring value to the final product and to the customer.
Understand that I'm not saying that I should write bad code, I'm just raising this question about sometimes sacrificing time and putting too much effort or more than it should. Don't write bad code. So what I want to do is bring that question: are we delivering value for sure? Or we're just focused on our own meters (from the company sometimes) that just make our lives worse?
Often I see flame war about tech, languages, libs, and hippies frameworks that even though they have good reasons, in most cases, they just want to be hippies. Sorry to say this, but that is what I have seen out there! We don't see people talking about the best way to attend to the customer, about inviting him to decisions and project phases. It seems that the main idea is something like "I don't care about users, here I'm the boss, my code, my way."
I don't want to go deep, just bring that to light.
To finish I want to let the record that today I'm much more customer-oriented than company-oiriented. The goal it's the product, quality, and user experience. And don't just a good source code. I tell you again that a good source code it's crucial, but can't decide the result.
That's it! I'd love to see your comment.
Till next time! <o/
Originally posted at https://ricardocampos.blog/post/delivering-value/ on Oct 24, 2020, 10:43:35 PM
Oldest comments (3)
Great points, Ricardo. Raising your head from "I need to write perfect code" to "how do I deliver the best quality" is a sign of growth. Keep at it!
PS. Check out Grammarly to tighten up your English even more!
Have a great weekend 👋
Thanks, Simon! I'll check Grammarly for sure. If you see something that seems odd, please, share it with me. ;) Great weekend you too!
Actions can bring value in different ways.
If your code is easier to maintain it will therefore reduce the amount of time required to do so, hence the cost, looking at the long run will be more lineal, which can be measured statistically across the industry.
On the other hand, good mentoring, protocol and rules, can stablish your company or team as desirable to work in, which brings talent to it.
You, as individual dev can bring value in two different ways as well, one is to dig deep in a given tech stack to become an expert on it so you can help others on that.
The second is to gather cross knowledge, like SEO, Accessibility, UI, UX, project management, project governance... So you can align better different teams using this knowledge, by reducing the friction between teams on not-100%-accurate acceptance criteria definitions, to make teams understand what can be developed and what don't in a given amount of time, to spot critical paths, future blockers and so on.
Hope this helps somehow to bring some light on this topic. 🙃