When you start out, getting something/anything into prod feels like a win. And it is! But with time that novelty begins to fade. You realize that anything in prod that doesn’t add some high multiple of value is just dead-weight (psychically, and operationally) (2/9)
You also become more tuned into success theater, which is like kryptonite to puzzle solvers. It feels dirty and wrong. It feels insincere (3/9)
The challenge is that FFs are the default for a good reason. Breaking out of the feature factory is *hard*. It’s a spectrum. And sometimes, in some situations, your best bet is to deliver a whole bunch of (usable) features (4/9)
...after talking with tons of people about this, I’ve realized it is the transparency and reflection that *really* matters. Not whether some work is more prescriptive than other bits of work. This is why framing work as “bets” feels so right...(5/9)
Bets can be big, small, certain, a long shot, “played well”, and cut short. We acknowledge the uncertainty, and also commit to reflect on how we did. That’s the crux, not a arbitrary level of prescriptiveness (6/9)
Measurement is important (heck, I work for a product analytics company that democratizes getting insights (@Amplitude_HQ ) but you have to be able and willing to act on those insights. That’s where tooling, infra, quality, psych safety, and autonomous teams come into play (7/9)
You also have to have an engagement model internally that allows for continuous improvement...because no one wakes up one days and “solves” the feature factory. You can’t re-org yourself into it. It’s like any effort to survive and remain competitive (8/9)
Finally...to reiterate, it is all about smart problem solvers seeing the impact of their work. You can only retreat into craft for/ so long before you say “hey, is any of this working?” That’s about as human as it gets (9/9)
