Some Stuff I’ve Learned

I picked up my Xbox One this morning – a special white console with “I made this!” engraved on it. The reviews started appearing last night, and for the post part, they’re quite positive (and I’m not surprised by the drawbacks listed in the reviews I’ve read so far). Now that this project is officially behind me – and before I figure out what’s next, I have some backlog blog posts to share.

Lessons Learned

I gave a keynote at STAR West in October on “Lessons learned from Xbox One”. Given that it was an unreleased product at the time at the time of the presentation, rather than talk about the details, I spoke mostly about the team, and how strong team principles lead to great software projects (I spoke of my love of the Xbox team in a previous post – https://angryweasel.com/blog/?p=723). I thought I’d share a few of those lessons.

Lesson 1: Build a Great Team

In order to build great software, build a great team first. I’ll say that differently in case it didn’t sink in (or make sense). Worry about building a great team first, and then let them build a great product. I realize this isn’t always an option for every organization, but I see too many teams take an existing group of people, and then try to make a product that isn’t in the sweet spot of that organizations strengths. A good team can usually make a few good things, but a great team can make anything great.

That leads to a phrase I heard once that rings too true – “Don’t ship your org chart”. Just over ten years ago, I was working on Windows CE (an embedded operating system loosely based on Windows). During product planning, I noticed what looked like an unbalanced number of networking features (there were a lot – including some relatively obscure functionality). I didn’t know if it was a product strategy decision, customer requests, or what, so I asked. The answer was, “Our networking team has a lot of people, and we need to keep them busy.” To this day, I still don’t know why there was no attempt to shift people around as needed for features customers wanted, but I do know it seemed silly at the time, and it seems silly now.

Which leads to…

Lesson 2: Diversity and strengths

I’m a believer in teams filled with (or at least largely populated by) specializing generalists. Everyone certainly doesn’t have to be able to do everything, but every team member should be able to do many things well, and a few things very well. It’s important, when building a team to have diversity in both generalization and specialization – and match those skills with what’s needed for your project.

In my opinion (and experience), you can’t have enough deep specialization. My official job title at Microsoft is Principal SDET – that means I’m in the Principal band, and that I don’t manage people. I think far too many testers (and organizations) see management as the only career growth path, when there is huge value in developing, growing, and nurturing the experience of experienced individual test contributors (which reminds me, I wrote a paper about the value of highly experienced non-manager testers a few years ago).

There are 100 or so Principal SDETs at Microsoft (plus more in the management ranks that I haven’t counted lately). When I joined the team two years ago, there were five of us (Principal testers) – two on the Xbox Live team, and three on console. For various reasons, we wanted a name for our virtual team on the console software team. The mythical Hydra name was already in use to describe our three-OS model, so after a bit of deliberation, we named ourselves after Hagrid’s three-headed dog in Harry Potter, and Team Fluffy was born. Over time, we expanded (and promoted) our way to eight Principal testers in console, and three in Live, for what I believe is the highest team concentration of Principal testers at the company. Someone asked once if we needed that many Principal ICs – but honestly, I don’t know how we would have made this product without the diversity and deep skills of this group. I think the eight of us all contributed significantly to getting this product shipped on time with quality.

Teams and Products

Yes – products are important, but I’m a huge believer in the team first – and I think it’s just as difficult and challenging to build a great team, as it is to build a great product – and that we should all put the same care and passion into hiring and developing our teams, as we do in building great software.

I’ll share a few other lessons later this week.

Comments

  1. “In order to build great software, build a great team first.”

    Powerful words! Sadly, at many companies, great teams are not being built. Projects are simply thrown at existing (not always great) teams.

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