Double Down on Double Check

Building Digital Products is HARD. Doing Hard things is hard but it's what we need to do. Mindset is everything. Teamwork it's critical to achieve true innovation and avoid silos. I Deeply believe it is Blameless culture and Psychological Safety environments. Trust is the foundation of any high performant team. However there is a tricky thing, you really want to have trust because you want to have people being able to DISAGREE. Disagreement is really important nowadays, it's like a network of layers and layers of testing. Everybody wants to succeed, more validations the better. Everything we do is complex, lots of different roles: UX Designer, UX Researcher, Lean BA, Discovery Architect, Delivery Architect, Foundation Architect, Agile Coach and much more. As we look to technology we have an explosion of languages, stacks, libraries, and frameworks just to have the right tool for the job, get the better performance and best user experience we can provide. Cloud computing is how everybody is running the software(EC2, ECS, EKS, Serverless) it's all great but adds complexity and variation. There are dependencies, from other people, from vendors, from legacy APIS. How do we make sure it all gonna work? We need to double down in Double Checking.

The 5 Dysfunctions of a Team: Disagreement on the Spot!

Fear of Conflict creates a lack of commitment which will lead to low accountability and BAD Outcomes for your business. You need to be able to "disagree and challenge" all decisions, dependencies, and actions your team does. We need to PAY ATTENTION to everything, on every single detail, we need to BE ON TOP of everything. It might sound a bit paranoic but this can save you from several issues.

Let me give you some examples of how you can apply it, in your, day-by-day job:

1. The Framework / Library I pick it up, does it work? Did I test all use cases? Did I check all corner cases? Did I perform the right POC? (assume no).
2. The APIs I need to use is really done? Would they really work? Did I test with every single request I will need to make? (Assume it does not work)
3. Would the team really deliver the US today? Are we really on track? Are we with ZERO blocks, ZERO Delays, ZERO issues? (Assume it won't happen, assume there are delays, issues, and blockers).
4. I have a dependency on an API or Service is not done, Would I really get them on time? Could I mock and work in parallel somehow? (Assume your dependency will not work and will not be delivered on time)
5. Is the discovery work done? Are the US with the proper acceptance criteria? The UX prototype was really checked by the business? (Assume nothing is done, assume business will change).
6. It's my POC correct? Did I cover all the engineers will need it? It's your architect correct? (No, your architect is wrong, the POC is too simple - assume they are all wrong).

Assuming the BAD output is good. It makes us PAY ATTENTION to details and DEMAND for Evidence that things are really RELIABLE and work. Having this mindset will save you from lots of trouble and will make your teamwork much better. Stop seeing disagreement and challenge questions and personal attacks and start seeing and unit tests and opportunities to validate you are not messing up. Double-check it won't kill anyone. You need to double it down on it, Trust does not mean BLIND TRUST, it means we should maximize our collective intelligence and get most out of our teams.

Boiling Pastel

In Brazil, we have a fast-food named: Pastel. You dont need to overthink to make pastel, they ask you chicken or meat flavor and you boil it right away. How is your team working? Is your team CRITICAL THINKERS who challenge each other and maximize their Outcome or it's a group of Pastel Orders who just repeat top-down orders?

Cheers,
Diego Pacheco