My Team Is Great!

“My team is great, they haven’t produced a defect in a long time!”

I’ve heard managers say this with pride, but the truth is that “defects per unit of time” is a terrible metric for evaluating a team’s success.

A team that never produces defects isn’t necessarily high-performing. They might just be playing it safe, forced to slow down because the environment around them wants to see heads roll when they make mistakes.

Imagine running a 100m race. We can sprint, take risks, and sometimes stumble, or we can play it ultra-safe and almost walk to the finish line. Which one leads to growth?

High performance isn’t about avoiding failure, it’s about how we handle it. Great teams experiment, fail, and learn. That’s how meaningful software gets built.

So next time we’re in a job interview and they ask, “Do you have any questions for us?” we should ask in return, “How do you manage failure?”

If their answer satisfies us, we’ll know exactly what to say when they ask why we want to work there: “Because you sound like a great place to fail!” 🙂🙃

Originally posted on LinkedIn.