In my interview with Zach, we created a process map of software development at his Airbnb Payments team. In this case study I am going to rant about randomization in software development processes.
What is randomization?
Zach told me that top Airbnb executives would sometimes change what software teams were working on. This is how that looked in the software process diagram:
This micromanaging impacts many software development teams. It is typically referred to as “randomization” because the result is that work priorities for the impacted team seem to randomly change. Randomization is toxic to a healthy workplace because it causes a productivity death spiral and it devalues employees.
The randomization productivity death spiral
Randomization can cause a software development team productivity death spiral. That spiral has three steps:
- Executives circumvent the software development process because they think the team is not making good progress
- Employees stop investing in the software development process because executives do not value that work
- Team productivity falls
The first step in the spiral is top executives deciding that their pet project is so important that they cannot wait for it to be implemented through the normal software development process. The executives tell a team to drop what they are doing and work on the pet project.
People on the randomized team have probably spent a lot of effort figuring out which projects are most important. Now they realize that effort was wasted. Team members stop investing in improving the software development process because they feel that work is not valued by executives.
Software development processes that do not receive the proper investment continually degrade. As the software development process deteriorates, team productivity decreases. Executives will become even more impatient and will micromanage the team even more. Eventually the team will implode and the engineers will leave or be laid off.
Randomization and devaluing employees
It is great for top executives to understand the product well and have their own hypothesis on product improvement. They should want their hypotheses to be implemented quickly to get quick answers. Everyone working on the product should want quick answers to their hypotheses. Higher up in the Airbnb process diagram there are product teams whose job it is to formulate and prioritize product improvements
When executives circumvent this hypothesis creation and prioritization process they are undermining the ownership of the product teams. When executives take their pet projects straight to the software teams they are acting as if the product team is not doing a good job of setting product direction and no longer deserves ownership of it.
It would be great for an executive to teach a product team how to identify the best areas of improvement. But when executives skip the product teams and tell the software teams what to do, there is little opportunity for organizational learning.
Employees want to feel ownership over their work. Employees want to feel like they are learning and growing their skills. In an environment with lots of randomization, employees will not feel that way and will be more likely to leave.
Anti-randomization
Top executives who randomize their software teams can’t even imagine a world where their software teams are so efficient and effective that they run out of product changes to implement. But such a world is possible! Software teams that have time and support to improve their velocity are enabled to take a step back from individual features and look at the flow of work through the team. They can find and eliminate bottlenecks in the flow of features to create huge productivity improvements.
Instead of putting pressure on software teams to implement specific features, top executives should put pressure on software teams to implement more features faster. It is still fine for top executives to request features, but those requests should pass through the normal prioritization and evaluation processes. If the feature velocity is improved significantly it will not take long for the feature requested by the executive to be implemented.
An emphasis on increasing velocity and productivity will push organization members to become more effective and grow their skills. It will push organization members to improve their processes and take greater ownership over their work. I hope Airbnb can discover this.
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