Well-thought-out engineering processes are an asset to any company – but if they aren’t being updated regularly, these processes can start to slow you down.
I came to Interlock from a company with a culture of heavyweight engineering processes. It was a well-oiled machine with battle-tested and often updated procedures.
From an engineering perspective, it successfully kept you focused on coding. Tasks were always well-described in Jira, and included clearly defined expectations. Designs came in and were exported to HTML so you didn’t have to worry about using Sketch. You did your job, then moved the task to QA. If something came back, it was always with a good description of what wasn’t working.
When I started at InterLock, however, I was surprised at how lightweight the weekly engineering processes felt compared to my previous company. No estimations. No Jira. No separate QA team. Initially, I felt overwhelmed. I wondered why it looked this way, why everyone just aligned and no one tried to structure the processes as I was used to.
“Processes have to serve the development of the product”
The main reason is that in both of these companies, there were different problems to solve, even though it looked similar on the surface. Interlock is very much a product-first company, and very heavyweight processes can be too much of a constraint in a product-first company. In this sort of environment, the processes have to serve the development of the product, rather than the product developing out of predetermined processes.
At Interlock, we have a very strong culture of solving the right problems. We are ruthless in defining what the true problem is, how we solve it using a small, well-scoped project (or a cupcake, as we like to call them), and how it might eventually look like if the cupcake proves to be successful.
In short, we ask what is the problem and how will you measure that it’s solved. And we don’t just use this approach when working on our products – we try to apply the same approach whenever we want to add new or adjust existing engineering processes.
The subconscious benefit of processes
In any organization, processes are important and beneficial. They streamline the workflows, help people make fewer mistakes and bring some degree of comfort – having a good set of processes can create the sense that work has already begun to proceed.