How to Build Deep Focus Into Your Organizational Culture

But then again, business incentives are usually against software that works well and is useful - what matters is whether software works just enough to look sellable.

What this misses is that a buggy code base with a lot of technical debt makes it very hard to get anything new done. Worse, because you've spent years teaching people that being sloppy is the way to go, even when they rewrite something or build something new, it won't be very good and will still have a high maintenance cost.

Whereas if you follow a quality-first approach from the beginning, you never build up those mountains of technical debt. You can have a sustained pace of innovation that's much higher because you aren't working on top of a garbage heap. And you have people with excellent habits and a good working environment, meaning high productivity and low turnover.

Tracker is only a communication medium. In such an environment you don't "do what Pivotal tells you", you do what you decided to do as a team, because as a team you prioritized stories in the backlog. That means, as a team, you have pretty high autonomy. You also have autonomy when working on stories, because they should only tell you what and why to do something, not how.

If have to compromise a lot to take team decisions, your team is probably not aligned very much. Do you share the same goals with everybody else?

For most people around me, joy comes from being productive, helping your team to make good products at a fast pace, and from interacting with people the whole day.

I eventually realized that those tools are not meant to be your boss - they're only means of storing what you figured out when you had more time to focus on something. You can disobey them at any time, freely, but if you find yourself constantly disagreeing with your own todo list, it suggests you need to work on what you put in there in the first place. They're meant to optimize, not take away your autonomy.

(Shared todo lists, as it's what all those project planning / issue tracking tools essentially boil down to, is a little different thing because other people put stuff in it too, but the principle is still the same - it's not there to limit your autonomy, it's there to improve your focus and free up your memory.)

We had the same "pick the next thing" rule:

http://williampietri.com/writing/2015/the-big-board/#toc3

We still had a sense of control, because the team jointly decided the order of the cards every week. If we thought there was a business or a technical reason why A should come before B, the product manager was great at hearing our notions. We all believed that the ordering was our best guess as to business value order.

But what we also got out of the rule was a sense of fairness. If I could go up and skip to the second card because I didn't like the first one, I'd be making a colleague take something I didn't want to do. Always taking the first card meant that unpleasant tasks were randomly distributed.

I should add that we were in a pairing environment and would switch pairing partners once or twice a day, so everybody ended up working on a variety of things anyhow. If you really wanted to work on something, you could just say so and get the swap to go in your favor.

So basically, we weren't just doing what Pivotal told us. We were doing what we thought was the most important work first, and we were handing it out in a way that was fair to everybody.