Speed-Up and Accelerate

• Engineering orgs slow down as they age.
• Two different economical models
  1. A “cost center,” where every engineer hour not spent on features must translate to (at least) one engineer hour saved
  2. "investment", which speed to delivery, rather than number of engineer hours paid, is the dominant economic factor–and in which considerable, sustained investment in that speed can reap massive economic returns.
• If you can ship faster, you can then gather feedback, and
  1. Iterate
  2. Abandon
  3. Sell to Someone Else
• How to Invest in Latency Reduction
  1. Activities Engineers Bitch About
  2. Things Only Person X Can Do
  3. Look for Queues
  4. Automated Tests
  5. Monitoring
  6. Post Mortems (How to Run a Post-Mortem (With Humans, Not Robots), Velocity 2013)
  7. Decentralization with Safety Nets / Impact Reduction Schemes

-- from Speeding Up Your Engineering Org, Part I: Beyond the Cost Center Mentality

This article reminded me of Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps¹, one of the best software engineering books I've read in 2019.

• They both use the same metaphor "speed" for organization growths.
• They both emphasize on this "growth"/"investment" mindset/model.

The Accelerate book explains why we need to speed up with tons of evidences from the surveys they conducted over the last several years. The Speed-up post explains it in theory. So I would highly recommend you read them both.