The Hacker Factor: Embrace the Need to Ship!
In this critical phase, the question arises: "Will your team hack it for you or not?" It's also the first time the ASE coaching team works closely with the customer delivery team. Until now, the focus was on staging: defining strategic and tactical objectives, negotiating metrics criteria, and guiding the multidisciplinary team through a series of classes prepared by ASE. From this point on, the ASE coaching team embeds itself within the customer's delivery team, owning the outcome together - your performance is our reputation.
Introduction:
In today's fast-paced technological landscape, a strong hacker culture can make a significant difference in efficient execution. Hacker culture refers to values and practices prioritizing innovation, collaboration, and rapid development using automation techniques like Continuous Deployment (CD). Companies like Amazon and Google attribute all of their success and market dominance to having successfully grown their own brand of hacker culture.
Continuous Deployment in 2023:
As technology evolves, CD has become crucial for mature companies. Consistently shipping new features and improvements is a successful hacker team's hallmark. Companies must watch for warning signs such as missed daily deliverables, broken promises, unclear asks, and ambiguous goals, as these may indicate issues with the team's maturity. Mastery of CD is essential to be considered a hacker team.
Inspiration from Google and YouTube:
Google and YouTube are prime examples of companies that successfully built and maintained a strong hacker culture with a distinct brand. They demonstrate that preserving a corporate culture based on innovation and rapid development is achievable at scale.
The Hacker Way: Production First
A typical week in a hacker-driven company multidiscipline domain team might include:
1. Monday: Business Experts (BE) present a new idea to a Hacker Pair (HP). Together, they define the functionality using Domain Driven Design (DDD) and EventStorming (ES) techniques.
2. Tuesday: The HP implements the idea using Behavior Driven Development (BDD) and Test Driven Development (TDD) based on Monday's Specification by Example (SbE).
3. Wednesday: The BE reviews automated acceptance test results and explores the new feature in a read-only ephemeral copy of production. They either request enhancements or accept the feature.
4. Thursday: The new feature is deployed to production, and user traffic is routed to it. The BE and HP analyze user behavior in production.
5. Friday: The team reflects on the initial outcome and discusses potential improvements.
This process may take many weeks or months in traditional companies but can be completed within days by a hacker-driven company.
Hacker Culture Principles:
One key principle of hacker culture is "Don't Repeat Yourself" (DRY), which encourages automation and efficiency. Hacker teams follow a Continuous Deployment (CD) working model emphasizing rapid, iterative development.
The Relationship Between Development and Operations (DevOps):
An early advantage of hacker teams is extensive automation, which involves more methods than tools. This practice, now mainstream, is known as DevOps, emphasizing that one group is responsible for a feature's full lifecycle, from idea to production. Traditional companies often misunderstand this, thinking that DevOps is a separate team dictating pipelines to development teams - this is merely a renamed, siloed waterfall practice that offers no real advantage.
The ASE Factor:
As we collaborate to build your hacker culture, our coaching team will guide you, while your commitment and persistence fuel the process. The critical raw material is having the right people on board—individuals with a need to ship and a personal drive.
We don't coach cogs, but rather seek out the renegades, misfits, tinkerers, and creative thinkers within your organization. These individuals, when united, form a high-performing team that becomes the seed of your unique corporate hacker culture brand. With the right people and our guidance, your company can embrace innovation and thrive in the fast-paced technological landscape.
Tetiana Kuhay
Chief Executive Officer