by Serguey Shinder
In the first half of last year we put thirty one changes in front of customers. In the second half we put out a hundred and forty four. Writing software had become genuinely cheaper for us, the backlog we had been apologising about for three years started actually moving, and I was as pleased with that number as I have been with any number in my working life.
In February a logistics customer with about sixty people using our screens every day asked, on a quarterly call, whether there was a way to get a version that stopped changing. She was apologetic about asking. Three weeks later a second customer asked something close enough that I stopped treating it as one person's preference.
What we had done to them is not complicated once you look at it from their side. A hundred and forty four changes across six months is something moving on their screens roughly every second working day. Their induction pack for new warehouse staff was forty odd pages with screenshots in it, maintained by one supervisor in her own time, and it had been wrong continuously since about October. Their standard operating procedures referenced buttons by name. Our own support agents had started answering questions from a version of the product that no longer existed, because they had learned it once and we had changed it nine times since. Our release notes, which we wrote carefully, were opened by three per cent of the accounts they were sent to.
The part I had not thought about at all is that only one half of the work got cheaper. Producing the change collapsed in cost. Deciding whether it should exist did not. Explaining it did not. Retraining somebody's staff did not, and we were not paying for that anyway, so it never appeared in any figure I looked at. And the capacity of a person on the other end to absorb a rearranged screen while doing their actual job has not improved since I started in this industry.
We now batch anything customer visible into one monthly release with a single set of notes and a fortnight of notice for anything that moves or is renamed. Invisible work, which is most of it, still ships whenever it is ready. Our throughput is unchanged. Complaints of that kind have stopped.
The lesson I did not expect is about where a limit actually sits. For twenty years the constraint on how fast a product could change was us, so we spent twenty years learning to measure ourselves and improve ourselves, and every instinct I have is built for that. The constraint has moved to the people using the thing, and they have no way to tell us they are at capacity except by asking us, awkwardly, on a call, to please stop making it better.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
Leave a Reply