Using Regularity to Measure Improvement

Yes, everything in your job is changing almost every day right now . It was true before, before we had agentic coding hit the scene this year. It really has been quite a quite a long year for four months, hasn't it? But uh our our jobs used to change all the time as well, but now it's changing even more rapidly. It seems like the average company is inviting chaos. And so it might be tempting to believe that chaos is the new norm, but I'm here in this episode, where it's going to be a fairly short episode because I want you to really get this point driven home very clearly. I'm here to tell you that part of your job as a senior engineering leader is to make sure that chaos doesn't win . It's to make sure that you're not only watching out to make sure to kind of rein it, uh, you know, rein it in where you can , you're here to create order . To not just fight the chaos when it happens, but to go on the offense and create order. And we're going to talk about one important way to do this on your teams in today's episode, my name is Jonathan Cottrell. You're listening to Developer Team My Goal on the show. These job driven developers like you find clarity, perspective, and purpose in their careers. That first point, that first point is clarity . All right. Uh very often you can probably proxy to clar ity as an antonym of chaos, right ? It's not exactly an antonym because uh chaos is kind of a perceived thing . And uh if we were to look if we were to think about clarity, could you have clarity in chaos? I guess it's potentially possible, but the limiting factor in so much of our work is something that we're often forgetting. We often forget that humans haven't really changed a lot . It's not that we can't change, we certainly have over the course of humanity , but we change very slowly. The fundamental capabilities of the human brain, for example, have gone essentially unchanged for tens of thousands of years . And so what may feel like progress, because it is, it's progress of the collective, it's progress of our kind of wielding and um our our tooling and our you know documentation and knowledge gathering, all of these things are our progress. But the fundamental capabilities, in other words, think about it like if you were to spec out a human, right, from from raw materials, if if you were to treat us like a machine , our specs have not changed very much at all, certainly not in the course of our lifetimes, even though it feels like progress is so fast . And so what we were individually fundamentally at the rawest , you know, form capable of a hundred or a thousand years ago is still true today. And so so often we forget that humans are almost certainly forever now going to be the limiting factor in all of our human-centric processes. Now you might cynically hear that I that you you might hear me like uh advocating for eliminating humans in the process. I actually don't think that's the right answer here. Because for all of our faults and all of our inefficiencies, humans are still incredibly capable. Right? We're we're still very good at some things, far better than machines are . We still catch uh, you know, for example, nuance errors and nuanced uh domain information that computers, at least as of the as of this recording, uh are not very good at catching. Right? There's there's a a whole host of things that humans can do, um not the least of which is be in relationship with other humans . Right? So we have uh you know we bring something unique to the table. So if you are uh if you're bought into the idea that humans are a part of your working future, which hopefully if you're listening to this particular show, then that's that's kind of a given for what we talk about here. If you believe that you're gonna be working with people , then to lead those people you have to go on the offense and fight against the chaos. Okay . What does that mean exactly? And what what are we gonna do uh to fight against the chaos? That's what we're gonna talk about right after we talk about today's sponsor. This episode is sponsored by SERP API. SERP is the web search API for your needs, whether you're building an application that needs uh real-time search data, like an AI agent or maybe an SEO tool, a price tra cker, anything else that needs to know what's happening on the web right now, SERP API is the web search API that handles that for you. And it does it across a bunch of different types of searches, not just web search, but things like location search, up-to-date location information. You make an API call, you get back cleanJSON, and they deal with all the headaches, the proxies, the captchas, the parsing, the scraping, all the things that you don't want to think about. You just want to build your application and have access to this stuff. They support dozens of search engines and platforms. They're fast and they've been doing this long enough. The companies like NVIDIA, Adobe, Shopify, all rely on SERP API. There's a free tier to get started so you can build and test your application before you commit to anything. And by the way, if you are building with AI, which probably most of you are now, SERP has an official MCP to make getting up and running a simple task. If your app needs to search the web in real time, think SERP API. That's S E R P API.com. Thanks again to SERP API for sponsoring today's episode of Developer Te am. So we're trying to talk about or or we're trying to uh to handle chaos . Your job, your life may feel chaotic right now. So much about just our normal responsibil ities is changing. We've talked about this on the show recently. And we're going to talk more about it in upcoming episodes because I do think there are some shifts in tactical skills and and actual approach to your job, the mindset that you uh will thrive with. Um and and we're gonna talk about that in upcoming episodes, but I want to talk about this kind of principle, fundamental principle uh of maintain ing uh a sense of order on a team. And specifically I want to talk about something that uh you've probably heard this this phrase , especially if you've been doing you know agile uh as a team . The phrase is cer emony . I guess it's just a word, not necessarily a phrase, but you might call them scrum ceremonies, for example, if you've done scrum or team ceremonies, whatever uh your your pick is here . And the ceremony , uh if if you're not familiar with this on you know on a Scrum team, for example, you have these set meetings that happen on a cadence. And they have a certain purpose, and each time you do that particular type of meeting, you follow the same , essentially the same kind of blueprint for the meeting, right? And we call these ceremonies because uh we're essentially engaging in it's got a predetermined set of actions, set of discussion topics, etc., right ? And we're doing it ceremonially. In other words, um we're doing it as a matter of our normal oper ation . Right ? And the the ceremony of it is that you are uh you've given it a name and you've given it some kind of structure and meaning . And it may feel like these ceremonies are restrictive, and certainly uh, if, if you've run you know a healthy team, then you recognize those restrictive parts and you would make adjustments and you try to determine what's what's best going forward . But I want to argue today, regardless of whether you are using Scrum or Kanban or something that's totally out of that world, uh, however your team is running, um you know, maybe maybe you departed the the the you know the agile landscape a long time ago . My admonition today is for you to keep your ceremonies . I do not mean to maintain what you did yesterday forever . Right? That's not what I mean . Uh what I really mean is to become the greatest That is to continue to cultivate the habit of ceremony . Uh I I really am uh taking a strong stance on you know what specific processes people uh undertake . Because I think every team is different. I think there's a lot of uh uh you know conditional factors to take into account when you're talking about what kind of process works for one team versus the next, how much testing, how much validation, how much planning, how much estimation, what whatever is necessary for your team to succeed, that's not what I'm here to dictate. Instead, what I am here to dictate is regularity of action. Regularity of action . All right, so what does this mean? It means that when you engage in work , you have some determined way that you do that . You have some repeated aspects, right? Whether that's on a cycle, whether it's on an uh uh you know on a pull basis, maybe it happens on a trigger, right? These are things that happen over and over . And some examples of this might be things like a weekly planning session or a daily stand-up. These are things that have some recurrent nature to them. They it's not necessarily scheduled per se, although that's certainly uh uh fits the mold here. But it may be uh you know whenever we hit uh you know ten percent of uh of what we need in the backlog for a two for two weeks worth of work, then we do refinement. Right ? If you don't know what all these words mean, you can ignore the specifics and instead focus on the core here. The core message is there are some things that you will do together as a team on a regular basis or on a repeated basis . Okay, why why am why is this so important? As humans, we learn through pattern . Patterns are incredibly important to the human mind . We learn through repetition, we learn through pattern . And so the things that we do over and over, we become more and more comfortable with . And we kind of bring them into our minds so much so that we become very efficient at the things that we do over and over again . And sometimes this happens very quickly. For example, learning to type. Right? This is something that we do over and over again. So the form of the keyboard, imagine if the keyboard changed every single time you sat down . The keys moved to a different place. Right ? There's some spatial uh uh versions of this where you have ceremony in your space . You locate things in your home or in your residence, whatever, wherever you stay, maybe you locate things in your bag, uh you know, your in your laptop bag, for example, and every time you need it, you go to that place to get it . Right? This is a this is a little mini ceremony . Every time you uh sit down at the same seat at a table, people like ceremonies. Very often if you go to a coffee house on a regular basis, you're gonna sit in the same seat over over and . Why do we do this? Part of it is because our brains learn through this repetition. We learn uh because we start to gain this pattern recognition, right? And what's helpful about pr pattern recognition is as we talked about recently on the show, uh, we create these heuristics and so we start to uh reduce the uh the cognitive load necessary in order to perform a certain task. Right? You can get in your car, you go to to you know the place that you go every day, let's say you go to school or you go to work or you know you drop your kids off at daycare, wherever you go , uh you may go on autopilot. And meaning that you're essentially kind of going through the motions without really having to cognitively process what you're doing. Now if your uh route changed every day , that would be different, right? That wouldn't be as ceremonial . So what does this do for us ? Aside from the fact that it reduces our cognitive load and it kind of leaves, I won't say space, but it gives you the opportunity to use that thinking on something else. Right . What else does it do? Very importantly , very important ly , if you were to run an experiment and use the truly use like the scientific method to run an experiment The idea of having uh essentially variables that you hold steady , something that could change, but that you hold it steady is a fundamental idea in experiment ation because what you want to be able to do is create variation in a controlled manner . Very simple. You're going to change one parameter that you believe you have a hypothesis that changing that parameter is going to produce some kind of outcome. Right? You're making a guess about what you think is going to happen . Sometimes don't even have a hypothesis and you change something to see what happens. And then you generate a hypothesis for your next change . Right? The important factor here is the connection of that change to some effect is very difficult if a lot of things are changing. Right I'll give you a good example of this. If you're hiring very rapidly and your uh your company is adopting AI agentic coding at the same time, and you see your productivity increase, which one is it? Is it because you're hiring or is it because of the agenda coding adoption ? Well hopefully all of the engineers who are listening to this are thinking, well let's isolate the variables, right? Let's isolate uh the fact that we're that we're a du maybe we can look at individual uh productivity and then aggregate the individual producti there's ways of of right of of limiting the variation . Okay, so in a world that is so chaotic, how can we continue to get better? If you're listening to the show, presumably, uh one of your goals is to get better. You want to get better as an engineer, as a leader, as a human . And a fundamental kind of path to getting better is experimentation and adjustment, changing one little variable at a time and improving . Improving. So we change a variable with an intent of uh achieving a particular outcome and we we hypothesize what will this change bring to me? We make the change and we adjust, we continue this process, right? Okay, so if you want to continue getting better, you have to be able to control for the chaos because the chaos creates noise and makes it difficult for you to know if you are getting better. Right ? This is uh you know there's there's multiple reasons that we talked about here for why fighting chaos is is a worthwhile endeavor . The the first reason is that it's uh it is a fundamental part of who we are as humans to seek order . Right . We uh we want to create order because it reduces our cognitive burden. It creates a a more sane environment for people. It's it's a healthier place to be when we can create order . It doesn't necessarily mean that um you know some period of chaos is unhealthy, but rather we create order, we create cerem ony in order to recognize when things change . This is another aspect kind of on the flip side. We have changes that are on purpose, and then we have changes that occur outside of our control . And so if you have ceremony , if you create regularity, then anomalies that are occurring, let's say on your team, for example , let's say that you have a you know a regular uh way of kind of sizing the amount of work that you're gonna do. You have a regular way of evaluating you know how much work was done. And then you see a dip in productivity, even though everything else stayed the same. Right? It's kind of the inverse version of an experiment. Some variable changed. What happened? If if most things were held constant, you have a higher likelihood of recognizing what exactly caused the blip on the radar. Right? So there's plenty of reasons why, and hopefully, as you go into your team today, in the in the coming weeks, as this change swirls around us, you uh take the time to talk about with your teammates, talk about what your ceremonies are. What do you want to hold constant? What do you want to be true on a regular basis? Thanks so much for listening to today's episode of Developer T. Hopefully this was helpful and another touch point in kind of a chaotic uh world that feels like uh you know the human parts are kind of getting jostled around right now. And hopefully you can bring that to your team. Uh thank you again to today's sponsor, SERP API. Uh you can get started building with SERP API totally free today. They have an MCP to get you up and running very quickly. Head over to SERPAPI.com. That's S Erp API.com to get started for free today. Thanks so much for listening and until next time. Enjoy Enjoy your tea