Randy Shoup
Breaking Codes, Building Jets, and Designing Teams

Discussion: Issue #195

Throughout engineering history, focused and empowered teams have consistently achieved the near-impossible. Alan Turing, Tommy Flowers, and their teams at Bletchley Park broke Nazi codes, saved their country, and brought down the Third Reich. Kelly Johnson and the Lockheed Skunk Works designed and built the XP-80 in 143 days, and later produced the U-2, the SR-71, and the F-22. Xerox PARC invented Smalltalk, graphical user interfaces, Ethernet, and the laser printer. What can this history teach us? Well, basically everything.

Effective teams have a purpose - a clearly defined problem which the entire team focuses on and owns end-to-end. Effective teams have an organizational culture that prioritizes collaboration and learning. And most importantly, effective teams are made up of people from diverse backgrounds and experiences.

If this sounds a lot like DevOps, or true little-a agile, that’s no coincidence. But too few organizations actually practice these three-quarter-century-old ideas despite the overwhelming evidence that they work. So let’s relearn those history lessons.

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