Held on 19 January 2023
Grumbles To Gold
Nobody wants to work in the Complaints Department, and most of us get our full daily dose of whining and moaning from our families. It can be especially galling when highly-paid engineers start in on "legacy code" and "best practises" and the exquisite pain of Friday night on-call. Aren’t sales and customer service burning midnight oil and making do with crappy systems too? It’s enough to make you want to close your ears and tell them to get back to work—but that would be a big mistake.
Feedback from customers is often confused and misaligned with your product goals, but contains highly important grains of truth that can give you competitive advantage. In just the same way, when engineers say "this code is spaghetti", you don't need to give them carte blanche to rewrite everything, but they are giving you a valuable insight into risk and opportunity in your software assets. And the fact that they're speaking up at all bodes well, because it means they haven't given up; the trick is to bring them into the design of a solution so everybody wins.
Join me for a free, highly interactive livestream where we'll discuss:
- Why nurses who report more errors are more successful, and how you can create a psychologically safe environment where constructive feedback is welcome.
- The method of "joint design" for addressing problem areas with real involvement and buy-in (and why beer often helps).
- How pairing and runbooks can eliminate "tech power inversion", your paralysing fear that the star engineer will disappear.
