Everyday Reflections

I have a fitness watch that I use when I’m running. Many of you will also have smartwatches that track things like movement, steps, and standing time.

And you’ll know it can be useful to remind you of what you are doing… or maybe NOT doing (!)… and prompting you into action.

On my watch, I can see the health metrics related to my running (speed, distance, heart rate etc.). If I spend time away from running, I see these metrics drop off. Little by little.

Though it’s the same the other way round – as I train, the health and performance metrics creep back up.

What’s important is making sense of ALL that you’re tracking and using ALL of the data to really know if you’re progressing how you want to be.

After all, it’s possible to do 10,000 steps simply by moving around your house. That’s very different from 10,000 steps completed in a fast-paced run!

In other words, you need to look holistically at different data sets to know what that data is telling you about the goals you’ve set.

Let us apply the same thing towards engineering health and the needs for healthy habits of becoming a data driven engineering organization so that we are better version of ourselves everyday. It means the decisions we make and the actions we take are done because we are taking ownership of a situation – we care because it matters to us and is important we get it right. Like our personal health, it’s up to us to look after our products and do the right thing to get the right outcomes.

What often happens is , if we only ever look at business performance metrics it can be easy to assume the health of our products are fine. And, while I would always say that business performance IS important – it’s not the only marker of product health. Far from it.

Therefore it is important to measure and monitor planning , operations , optimization and inspiration indicators. Leverage data to track down various aspects of performance including stability, speed, security, discovery, and experimentation & do what is easy today to track and start ! We should be using all of this information to help us. Because if performance starts to drop in any of these areas, it can have big knock-on consequences for other areas.

Like my sports watch analogy – if you’re not checking regularly, and reading all the data – bit by bit, the health of the product will deteriorate. And will take more effort to get back on track.

Let’s be passionate about our software products – to care about them as we would care about ourselves. I want regular conversations with your domain leaders to talk about product health and look at where we can fine-tune and improve.

Getting into a mindset of continual improvement is so powerful. And – honestly – it’s easy too. Small incremental improvements soon add up.

Every small improvement will have a great ripple effect in the system.

So keep asking yourself – what can I do to make a better version of myself tomorrow morning? It’s a great question. And applies just as well in a professional and personal setting.