The Main Thing: KPI's drive behaviours

It costs more and takes longer to get anything built.

That's a common complaint when you talk to business stakeholders and senior leaders. This puts a lot of pressure on development managers to ensure that committed dates are achieved, and they pass that pressure on to their teams.

We talk about things like a culture of quality, paying down tech debt, and continuous improvement but the pressure of delivering the next feature often takes priority.

Culture sounds nebulous and complex but it is actually pretty simple - people respond to incentives. If you set the right KPIs and actively reward them, then people's behaviours will follow.

If you are a manager I'd love to know your thoughts on the relative importance of some common KPIs in your role. 

Rory

This Weeks Updates

Enabling the Team

Product Management Theater by Marty Cagan
Marty highlights how product owners and feature product managers are at risk in turbulent times and how they can upskill to become empowered product managers.

Why Calling Your Workers Heroes Can Backfire by Lindsey D. Cameron, Curtis K. Chan, and Michel Anteby
Instacart launched a "Heroes" campaign to recruit workers. While moralising work in this way might seem beneficial, it can also backfire.

Product Direction

Why Goal Cascades are Harmful (and What to Do Instead) by John Cutler
Goal cascades are neat and simple but they hide the interconnectedness of achieving goals which can block progress.

When Did You Last Remove a Feature? by Ant Murphy
When was the last time you removed a feature from a product? Most features are not regularly used so you should trim features to keep product complexity down.

Continuous Discovery

Guide to UX Planning — How to Create a Roadmap by Rebecca Granat Shapiro
Rebecca shares her three-step process: Identify the type of work you do, hold effective planning discussions and draft a shareable roadmap.

Your Customers Are Not Always Right by Itamar Gilad
Accepting customer requests at face value can lead to bad product decisions. Here's what you should do instead.

Continuous Design

If You Want To Be Creative, You Can’t Be Certain by Ida Persson
Creativity and certainty are opposites. You need to move past predictability to innovate.

The Gulf Between Design and Engineering by Rune Madsen
Cross-functional teams aren't easy to implement. Rune shares five steps for making it easier.

Continuous Delivery

HTMX and Web Components: a Perfect Match by Igor Roztropiński
There is a movement away from bloated complex front-end systems to more simple frameworks that take advantage of the attributes of the web.

The Cost Crisis in Observability Tooling by Charity Majors
Observability costs can grow 10x faster than your traffic due to how the observability tools work. Charity introduces observability 2.0 to solve these problems.

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The job of the Week

UI/UX Developer
🏬 Ford Motor Company
📌 Hybrid, Dearborn, MI, United States

About Ford
Ford Motor Company, founded in 1903 by Henry Ford and headquartered in Michigan, revolutionized the auto industry with assembly line production. Known for the Model T, one of the first mass-produced cars, Ford's diverse lineup includes vehicles like the Mustang, F-Series trucks, and Explorer SUV.

See role details here

The Results of Last Week’s Poll

The question was: What factors influence your adoption of a new technology:

There are a lot of different challenges that cause teams to be delayed, from overly ambitious estimates to bureaucracy to technical debt and scaling issues.

Could all of these items actually be related? I think so. The processes we use today are a bad fit for how we need to work in software. We need to iterate to figure out what customers really want, we are continuously editing the same underlying code so thinking in discrete projects leads to trading off future performance for a current deadline and we can't just ramp up more teams without also ramping up interdependencies and cascading delays.

Our mission at UXDX is to help companies shift from the project way of working, with all of the problems above, to empowered teams. Easy to say but hard to do.