If you have received a WhatsApp message from a colleague on Saturday evening then you can sympathise Leon. Leon is not only a DevOps but also a married man. He had planned an evening to the movies with his wife until he received the message “Cyclic restarts in the registry-microservice. Help!” Leon was not standby, nobody was standby, but if he didn’t get involved the other colleague would be alone with the trouble (trouble is polite enough). So he got in to extinguish the fire.
On Monday morning peace has returned in the microservices system but not in the face of Leon. In the morning coffee, Leon says: “The registry-microservice couldn’t hold the last of this release but nobody has asked me before doing it. Afterwards, I’m responsible to bring it back to life. I feel like I have an old-timer sportscar which I love and I take care of. One morning I come to the garage and I see that it has a luggage rack on the roof and camping equipment for seven people loaded, no need to mention that it has only 2 seats. Then my mother-in-law says “hurry up we go to the coast for the weekend”. The rest you can imagine. I fancy no more maintaining the service. I don’t feel like doing it. If nobody is interested in my opinion I’ll stay in the background and I’ll execute their orders”. Silence had laid down in the coffee corner. We all knew what Leon meant. We identified the problem and then went back to work further like this.
For goodness sake, stop the hierarchy madness. Put the decision and the responsibility for the product together where they belong! To the people doing the work. Give your employees full ownership of what they produce and trust them. Trust though doesn’t come out of the blue. It needs a plan on how to meet the business-expectations. What are those expectations? Usually, it’s to deliver on time what the customer wants in good quality so that the customer will be satisfied and pay. In more measurable terms, to delay the delivery at a maximum of 30% of the original estimate, to deliver the most critical features and have only bugs which let a workaround. Ah, and one more thing, “Remember the budget!”. Budget, customers, product and time keep traditionally busy the senior management. They feel totally insecure to follow a new approach and give full ownership to the people doing the work. Let us present them a plan on how it could work.
A holistic approach to the product has a startup company. In the beginning, it has ten persons at maximum. They take care of what they produce, how to bring it to the market, how to make customers aware of their product and how to keep a healthy flow of money. People working in startup companies take usually much lower salaries than in a well-established company but they do it because of the pleasure of ownership and the perspective of earning more money in the future. It worths to mention the experience of my husband as he worked in a startup company. It was made by graduate students who took a fund to bring their diploma-project to the market. The fund has covered their basic needs for office, equipment and their personal monthly expenses. “Even with this basic salary and premises, all the five colleagues work so eagerly that I have never seen before in my career”, said my husband at this time. A startup company with its eagerness to produce will be the building block of our full-ownership-plan.
Startups need to scale up at some point. As they grow up if they manage to clone themselves like Gismo in the Gremlins (Film 1984) then they build the big company as an association of smaller startups. In the course of time, if they remember why they came together and what keeps them collaborating, then the association can be developed in a sustainable ecosystem of startups. In the following paragraphs, we’ll examine the roles of the big company and the startups under its umbrella.
The big company acts somehow like a holding company. It hosts its smaller parts. It provides and maintains their working premises, it gives them a certain initial budget and a basic salary and takes care of the communication channels (the nervous system) throughout the company body. The main duty of the host company is to have a vision and make it concrete to all the employees. This vision will lead their decisions and make clear their dependencies. An example of collaboration in scale struck me right away when Paul, a friend whose hobby is sky diving, told me about an event they had in 2010 in the USA. Three hundred springers tried to achieve a world record. They had to do 3 different formations in the air and come safe to the ground. They tried it out one week long and every day something went wrong. At the very last day, at the very last trial, they succeeded to do it. In the evening event, their leader told them “psychoanalysts give several reasons why the teams succeed at the last try but for us it’s simple. We all just wanted to go proud back home”. A vision that the people are proud to follow is the connecting chain between the startups and keeps in alignment their individual roles.
The role of each startup remains the responsibility to find the customers, identify how their product could cover better their needs and do whatever is necessary to produce it. They still keep the full-ownership of their products in the bigger ecosystem of the host company. Building synergies between them in order to produce a more complex product is also responsibility of the startups. In this area they could receive coaching from the host company. In the end, the revenue is shared. One part flows back to the host company and the rest is divided to the employees of the startups.
I call this model the holistic ownership model. It’s an approach to keep the people responsible and enthusiastic as the company grows. The factors which can kill the holistic model or give it long life will be discussed in a further blog “How to make your ecosystem sustainable”.
I want to thank all the colleagues and friends who shared all those years their experiences with me during the coffee breaks.