Planting Perennials Next to Potholes

Silos, bikesheds, and focusing on what matters

If you’ve ever flown into Des Moines then you’ve had the privilege of driving on what might be the most decrepit major road in the metro area. An important artery, Fleur Drive is the only way to get to and from the airport, and the pavement is marginally better than that of a dirt road. Cars weave back and forth to dodge potholes and massive cracks in the asphalt as people race to catch their flights. There always appears to be some kind of construction going on somewhere along the six mile stretch of road, and yet, it never seems to actually improve. The road is also located in a major floodplain, so sometimes the city just closes it when the nearby river rises too much. It’s basically what you’d get if you agiled your way through urban planning.

Typically, you’ll see the Public Works Department planting flowers or otherwise maintaining the landscaping of the medians. It goes down to one lane when they have to water the flowers. Over the past month, they tore up and poured new concrete to replace the medians altogether, again bringing the road down to one lane in the process. The tulips look nice though.

It’s interesting because a lot of companies build software this way. They quickly pave the road by iterating their way there, ignoring nearby flood hazards or the anticipated traffic that’s going to be traversing it. They plant some flowers along the way to make it look nice and then move on to the next thing. Over time, the road deteriorates. Fleur is a main thoroughfare, so you can’t just close it and repave. The city doesn’t have the budget to repave it all at once anyway. So you patch up a few potholes and plant some new flowers.

There are a few different facets to this depending on what vantage point you look at it from. As it turns out, however, they all dovetail into the same thing. At the individual level, what you often see is bikeshedding. That is, engineers focusing time and energy on technical minutiae that, in the grand scheme of things, don’t really matter. Often it’s fixating on aesthetics and what you can see rather than function or things that truly move the needle forward in a meaningful way. Sometimes we get caught up in the details and plant flowers. When you’re up to your neck in alligators, it’s hard to remember that your initial objective was to drain the swamp. This often comes from a lack of direction for the team, and it’s the manager’s job to ensure we’re focusing on what matters.

At the team level, we start to run into siloing issues. This happens when we have different functions of the business focusing on their little parts of the world, more or less neglecting the other parts. Development focuses on development. Operations focuses on operations. Security focuses on security. What you get is gridlock, an utter inability to make progress because everyone is uncompromisingly fastened to their silo. Worse yet, what does manage to get done is a patchwork of competing goals and agendas. It’s building new medians as the roads crumble. And silos are not limited to pure business functions like development, operations, and security. There are silos within silos—Product Team X and Product Team Y, for example. Silos are recursive. They are a natural team dynamic that occurs as organizations grow in accordance with Dunbar’s number, especially at companies that rigidly specialize by function. This is why a cohesive vision is critical.

At the organization level, we see large-scale strategy problems and what I call “WIP-lash”—lots of WIP (Work In Progress), lots of shifting priorities, and lots of “high-priority” items. Priorities change at the drop of a hat or everything is a priority all of the time or the work is planned 12 months in advance and by the time we execute, the goalposts have moved. Executives make knee-jerk mandates in absolute terms to respond to the newest fire. Tech debt piles up as things are added to the never-ending priority queue (that’s at least one thing that doesn’t get equal priority as everything else!), but the infrastructure is in a constant state of ruin and the potholes don’t stop. WIP-lash is just strategic bikeshedding. This is a prioritization and planning issue through and through. We can’t close the entire road and repave it. Instead, we do it in phases. Managing tech debt works the same way. We have to pay it down periodically, but not with constant band-aids and chewing gum and not by stopping the world. We have to prioritize the work like everything else we do, and sometimes that means saying no to other things we deem important.

OKRs can be a useful way to force those difficult decisions and provide teams a shared vision. Specifically, they are the strategy to balance out the iterative tactics of agile. If you don’t have some kind of mile markers you’re working towards, you’re just iterating your way to nowhere. OKRs are not intended to be a waterfall approach, they are about providing strategic guidance. That doesn’t mean companies don’t screw it up though, especially when consultants get their hooks into things. They don’t need to be a large, scary, expensive process with fancy tools—just a Word document and real discussions about what needs to happen and dialogues about what is actually possible. OKRs are hard to get right though and, like anything, require iteration. A key part of good OKR processes is using them to drive discussions and negotiations up and down the organization. It surfaces conflicts and alignment issues earlier in the process. It provides line managers a mechanism to push back and force hard decisions and open a dialogue between groups. The discussions on what really matters and the negotiation about what is really possible is the major value.

“Do you want this or that? I only have resources for this.”
“Oh, I actually have engineers I can lend this quarter. Maybe that will help?”
“Sure, but we can only accomplish part of that.”
“We can make that work.”

OKRs are a vehicle for strategic discussions, not tactical status updates, task lists, or waterfall plans. Without some sort of guiding vision that you’re working towards, you’re just doing stuff. That might look and feel productive but only on the surface. It must be a negotiation if you want results and not just activity.

It really comes down to prioritization and alignment. At the individual level, we have tactical bikeshedding—focusing on items that are largely inconsequential. This is a prioritization problem. It falls on managers to keep teams focused, but it also flows from broader organizational issues. It’s particularly insidious in companies that separate product management (“the business”) from product development (“engineering”). At the organization level, we have strategic bikeshedding—being unable to make hard decisions and focus in on what matters to the business right now, resulting in WIP-lash. This is also a prioritization problem, and it leads to the tactical bikeshedding mentioned earlier. In between, at the team level, we have siloing. This causes all sorts of issues ranging from gridlock and broken customer experiences to duplication of effort. It’s an alignment problem.

There is not a simple, quick solution to these problems, but it starts at the top. If management is not in alignment and unable to prioritize what matters, no one else will. Work will happen, and to a passerby that can look reassuring, but is it work that matters? OKRs are not a silver bullet, and they are difficult to do and take time to get right. But when executed well, they can be a powerful lens to focus on what matters and provide a shared vision. As Intel co-founder and former CEO Andy Grove said, the most powerful tool of all is the word “no.”

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