Your engineers know how to build and release software much, much faster–the reason they’re not is probably that they don’t believe you want to.
When I show up to teach “elephant carpaccio” to teams, helping them to release new software every single day, the first thing they say is that they don’t know how to do it, that their industry or code base requires lengthy design, all-at-once changes, and thorough testing. But once we work through a few real examples, the light bulbs start to switch on and they figure out that the obstacles and objections are all in their heads.
There’s a spectacular demonstration of this going on right now with a new toy for developers called Stable Diffusion. With this tool, you can start with the picture on the left, and generate the one on the right with the click of a button.
OK, you have to give a brief description of what you want in text too, but that’s relatively low effort, and the result, I’m sure you’ll agree, is breathtaking. After they picked their jaws up off the floor, engineers around the world got to work: they souped up the speed, got it running on laptops, made animated videos, and much more–all in just the last week.
Why did Stable Diffusion take off at warp ten when so many tech teams merely clank along at glacial speed, releasing underwhelming changes after months of Sisyphean grunting? The difference is that the developers building these tools had no preconceived boundaries, no arbitrary scaling “requirements”, no testing police ensuring every script passed, no notion that producing a wrong result is catastrophic. Heck, they could just push the button again if the first result had the wrong shade of yellow for the sand or something.
What could your engineers do with no limits?
This first appeared in my weekly Squirrel Squadron email, which goes out every Monday, and was originally posted on 5th September 2022. To get my provocative thoughts and tips direct to your inbox first, sign up here: https://squirrelsquadron.com/