True North and Technical Debt
summary
Argues that a Toyota-style True North (monitor/alert/visualize + frictionless experience + always improving) reduces toil by forcing deliberate, measured improvement. Runs a one-team trial with daily checkmarks, then mandates 20% improvement time via a weekly TrueNorth day; finds checkmark measurement proves the idea but fails to scale, while problem walls with colored cards plus Friday swarms actually fix cross-team issues (feature flags drop from 104 to 50). Uses the 1% week-on-week compound example (166% gain in four years) to justify continuous small improvements.
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chapters (26)
- 0:00True North & Technical debt
- 3:20Why don't we get faster?
- 3:44We don't fix our problems
- 4:56We're addicted to complexity
- 5:56We do what's best for us
- 6:44We're obsessed with workarounds
- 7:05We disagree about everything
- 8:29Finding our True North
- 9:42Culture Automation Lean Measurement Sharing
- 10:14Our True North is our long range unachievable target of how we build brilliant software
- 10:27A tech & product summit
- 11:52How not to support change...
- 12:13We needed time
- 12:29Convincing the business
- 15:02Constant and deliberate improvement, to reduce toil & firefighting
- 15:17Intuition...
- 15:46Compound interest
- 17:51Proving a point
- 18:40Rolling it out
- 18:51Getting the teams on board
- 19:21Time conflict
- 19:38True North day
- 19:58Taking it further
- 20:51Shared problem walls
- 21:59Swarming
- 23:15Coaching and learning
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