Ask Your Developer by Jeff Lawson

Author:Jeff Lawson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harper Business
Published: 2021-01-12T00:00:00+00:00

Autonomy

Every human wants to feel empowered, and developers are no different. But even more so, as professionals they bring technology domain expertise that’s valuable to the companies they work for—but is often overlooked. The essence of autonomy is feeling trusted to make decisions. If someone else can just veto whatever decisions you make, then you’re not really all that autonomous. Of course, if you pull rank in a company, you can always make the decisions. But wise leaders who want their teams to feel trusted resist the temptation to overrule their teams’ decisions, instead erring on the side of autonomy. That’s how I think about it.

But full autonomy can become counterproductive in a world where teams have lots of dependencies, and it’s tough to wrangle thousands of people off in their own land. By empowering developers, you are trusting them to do their jobs and giving them tools, but you also instate some guardrails and rules. This is more realistic than full autonomy, especially for an organization at scale. Especially when we do need a full R&D org to focus on things like incident reduction, security, stability, and more.

So instead of letting developers just run around and do whatever they want, autonomy actually has its basis in rules. Without guardrails, people won’t know how to make decisions, and leaders will tend to second-guess them constantly. By creating rules, you paradoxically set people free—in the space between guardrails.

One of my favorite examples of this was from my high school. I was a member of my high school’s radio station, WBFH, known colloquially as “The Biff.” Broadcasting at 360 watts, we were proudly metro Detroit’s most powerful high school radio station. Being on radio station staff meant we all had jobs, like those at a real radio station, and we each had a weekly two-hour show to host. My senior year of high school, I had the job of music director, and my two-hour weekly show was called the Seven Hour Prison Experiment. Pete Bowers, the blond, lanky Tom Petty–esque teacher who ran WBFH, had only three rules for us: everything we did had to be “safe, fun, and legal.” Outside of that, it was our station to run! For example, when we wanted to promote the launch of the new Smashing Pumpkins album by broadcasting an on-air pumpkin smashing competition on the sidewalk outside the school—Mr. Bowers heard the plan and replied, “Well, it sounds fun, and legal. Just make sure it’s safe.” Not only are my WBFH memories some of the best from high school, but it was an amazing learning environment. Mr. Bowers let us make mistakes (as long as we were keeping things safe, fun, and legal) and learn from them. I’ve used Mr. Bowers as inspiration to guide my thinking about how to create an environment where the ground rules are known, and then everybody feels empowered to sprint forward.

What’s also implied, though, is that you should pare the rules down to the minimum needed to create a system that works.

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