Make the Right Thing the Easy Thing: Designing Processes Teams Will Actually Follow
summary
IBM inherits a business‑critical micro‑service with a bus factor of one and ends up rewriting it because no one else knows how it works. The talk argues for concrete fixes: onboarding docs, internal training, frequent code reviews, automated checks like Prettier, CI/CD and semantic‑release, and code bots to remove style fights. It gives a specific ROI claim — roughly $16,153 wasted per year from an hour a week across ten devs — and shows that the rebuilt processes reduce tech debt, increase velocity and raise vacation tolerance.
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chapters (35)
- 0:00Introduction
- 0:24Processes in Teamwork
- 0:47Lead Developers
- 1:18Two Choices
- 2:14Being the Team Star
- 2:37Being the Team Auditor
- 3:07Team Audit
- 3:43The Biggest Problem
- 4:24The Lottery Number
- 5:54Vacation Tolerance
- 6:33The Problem with Rockstars
- 8:04Approaching the Real Problem
- 8:22Why Process is a Good Thing
- 9:38Confidence and Clarity
- 10:44Documentation
- 14:58Why Processes Fail
- 16:37The Writer and the Elephant
- 17:35The Rider and the Elephant
- 18:04Make the Right Thing the Easy Thing
- 18:40Make the Right Thing an acronym
- 18:55Emotional rewards
- 20:05Being validated
- 20:50Being objectively correct
- 21:46Automating
- 22:30Fail on Style
- 22:51Be the Code Cop
- 24:21Simplification
- 26:40Tradeoffs
- 27:18Yak Shaving
- 29:02Focus on One Thing
- 29:42Work on the Foundation
- 29:53Wasted Time
- 30:12Fix a Mess
- 30:25Set Up to Succeed
- 30:49Lead Developer
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