80. Defining Operational Agility

Code[ish]

Rick Newman, a Director of Engineering at Salesforce/Heroku, is interviewing Yotam Hadass, the VP of Engineering for Electric, about team productivity. Agile development has been a popular way for teams to plan and execute on strategies, but it's come under criticism lately for being too dogmatic and rigid. Yotam and his team advocated for a different approach: operational agility. A core tenant of operational agility is embracing the idea of iteration. The goal is simple: make a plan, come up with some metrics for what a successful execution of that plan looks like, and when you're done, to review what you've accomplished and where you can improve. This "build, measure, learn" loop runs contrary to the misguided notion that the processes you operate under are forever set in stone.

To start introducing operational agility in your practices, Yotam suggests you first identify what makes your team most productive. For example, it could be your sprint planning processes, development workflows, CI/CD, architectural designs, and even the developer experience that your engineers face looking at the code base. You would continue to ask questions as to which of these are working and which are not, gather new feedback, attempt to resolve them with new strategies, and then continue to iterate on your process.

Although the idea is simple, there can be several challenges to shifting completely to such a different operational approach. First and foremost, it takes time to get started. You need to schedule conversations with every team, decide which questions to ask about your processes, have a strategy on how you're receiving those responses, and finally, turn them into decisions and action. Yotam believe that it takes commitment to proceed from there. From there, you also need to devise a common set of metrics, so that different teams aren't tracking "success" distinctly from the company as a whole. Still, Yotam says that for distributed teams, this common language of working has served Electric very well, in comparison to the top-down managerial approach many companies retain.