Fail Safe, Fail Smart, Succeed!

Putting this into practice at Avvo

If you think you would like to use these ideas at your company, but you are unsure where to start, I can describe what we did at Avvo. I joined when the company was already nine years old. It had a mostly monolithic architecture running in a single data center with minimal redundancy.

There were some things that we did quickly to move to a more fail-safe world.

Moving from planning around objectives to planning around priorities

First, we worked to build a supportive culture that could handle the inevitable failures better. We moved from planning around specific deliverable commitments to organizing our work around priorities.

Suppose specific achievements, my output, measure my performance. This way of measuring performance often creates problems.

Suppose I need to coordinate with another person, and their commitments do not align to mine. That situation will create tension. If the company’s needs change, but my obligations do not, there is little incentive to reorient my work. To achieve my commitments, I can be thwarted by dependencies or hamper the priorities of the company.

People in leadership like quarterly goals or Managing By Objectives because they create strict accountability. If I commit to doing something and it is not complete when I say it will be, I have failed.

Suppose you think instead about aligning around priorities. In that case, those priorities may change from time to time. Still, if everyone is working against the same set of priorities, you can be sure that they are broadly doing the right things for the company. Aligning to priorities sets an expectation of outcome, not output.

Talk about failure with an eye to future improvement instead of blame

The senior leadership team must be aligned with these approaches. The rest of the organization may not be initially. When leaders talk about failure, they must do it with a learning message rather than blame or punishment. People should know that the expectation is that they may fail. If they are avoiding failure, then they probably aren’t thinking big enough. It is a message that “we want to see you fail, small, and we want to make sure we learn from that failure.”

I created our slack channel to share the lessons from our failures. I sent a message to my organization, making it clear that I don’t expect perfection. I shared my vision that we become a learning organization in town halls and one-on-ones.

Fail-safe architecture

Monoliths are natural when building a new company or when you have a small team. Monoliths are simple to make and more straightforward to deploy when you don’t have multiple teams building together. As the codebase and organization grow, microservices become a better model.

It is critical to recognize the point where a monolith is becoming a challenge instead of an enabler. Microservices require a lot more infrastructure to support them. The effort to transition from one architecture to another is significant, so it is best to prepare before the need becomes urgent.

Avvo had already started moving to a microservices architecture, but lack of investment stalled the transition. I increased investment in the infrastructure team. The team built tools that simplified the effort of creating, testing, monitoring, and deploying services. We then made rapid progress.

We also redesigned our organization to leverage the reverse Conway Maneuver, further accelerating the new architecture.

You can build a fail-safe / fail-smart team

In every company, I use the lessons that I have shared in this article to build a culture where teams can innovate and learn from their users. It manifests differently with each group, but every team that has adopted these ideas has improved both business outcomes and employee satisfaction. Work with your peers to adopt some of these ideas. Start small and grow. The process of adopting these concepts mirrors the product development process you are working to build.

If you decide that it isn’t a good fit for your company, you will have failed smart by failing small.

I will leave you with a final thought from Henry Ford.