Stop all your feature development!
What if I tell you that as a product manager you are responsible to STOP feature development instead of shipping features. That you need to exercise your Andon Cord.
What is an Andon Cord? The Andon Cord is a rope.
But this rope is used for more than just tying luggage. The Andon cord is a rope that travels over the production lines while manufacturing cars. If there are any defects in a car during its manufacturing process, the Andon Cord is pulled and it shuts down the factory. Yes, you read it right. It shuts down the entire production line.
Imagine the power of a cord that could completely bring production of a factory to a halt. Now, you would imagine, that such a cord would be in the hands of a selected few. After all no one would want to shut down the whole factory for a single quality defect.
What if I told you that anyone on the factory floor could pull this cord.
The Andon cord was popularized by the Toyota Production System. Toyota built a culture where employees were encouraged to pull the cord if they discovered a problem with production, knowing well that it would totally halt production. This would typically be followed by a team leader investigating the root cause and fixing the issues as soon as possible and restart production.
The idea behind the Andon cord was that one unaddressed problem on the assembly line, could create huge complications that may have a domino effect on the entire day’s production. The Andon Cord though abrupt, is an effective way of dealing with issues at the source, before they festered into something much worse.
Andon Cord in software product development
As product managers we are fascinated by shipping more features. More features at the hands of the customers give us an adrenaline rush. It is time to pause and reflect.
In product development, the projects move on regardless of the active bugs. You don’t stop building products if a single bug is found, however, there are various parallels of the Andon Cord in product development as well.
If Andon Cords are not set up for your product, then this might be the right time.
Bug Jails
I highly encourage my teams to pull the Andon cord on any feature development if the bug count of the product goes beyond a threshold. Let’s say there are 5 engineers in your team and your bug count is 100. If as a product manager, you still insist on building new features, you are just piling on more technical debt for your team.
You might as well halt feature development before the customers write off the quality of your product.
In a bug jail, the entire team stops any feature production and instead only fixe bugs for few weeks or even sprints. You can have a threshold of 5 bugs per engineer in your team to exit the bug jail.
This kind of bug jail will also ensure that as a product manager you are brutal at your prioritization of bugs and issues. At times, product managers start thinking of low priority and low severity bugs as must fixes. This will give you a different perspective and appreciation of the engineering debt.
Shift left of quality.
Shift left of quality is when testing is performed earlier in the lifecycle of product development. Simply put, it is about including unit tests as part of your code.
In this case, when you are validating the quality of your feature with each code merge, you practically stop any inferior quality code to get merged to your main branch.
Here you don’t shut down product development for the whole team however for that developer, no more code changes can find their way into the product until the quality issues are resolved.
As a product manager, you should insist on high quality coverage in code.
Pull request reviews.
Many product managers feel that any pull request or merge request that happens is engineering responsibility to validate. This is a mistake.
As a product manager, you should also participate in pull request reviews so that if there are any functionality issues, user experience issues. wrong text messages, or quality issues then you can raise an alarm upfront.
Each comment put in a pull request is an Andon Cord that will allow the developer to fix the issue before the code merges into production. You should exercise that power.
Bug bashes
No matter how strong your quality tests are there is always a need for manual inspection of quality in your product.
Before a feature is shipped into production, there is a need to rigorously bash that feature to identify any quality or functional defects. This begins with identifying and writing good test scenarios. Once the test scenarios are identified, the entire feature crew validates the quality of the feature to ensure there are no inadvertent bugs introduced when you go live.
If there are any critical bugs, then you simply don’t ship the feature. As a product manager, you hold the power to reject a feature from going to production if the feature quality is not optimum.
Exercise that power judiciously since this is your Andon Cord. You halt your feature if it does not meet the quality bar.
Circuit Breakers
Circuit breakers are software delivery patterns where the software code is designed very much like a circuit breaker in your home. If one service dies, it isolates or is bound to only fail the things it controls and not create cascading service outages. In other words, this design pattern restricts the blast radius of a software issue.
When a circuit breaker is triggered, the team fixes that vulnerability before moving any further on feature development. The good thing about circuit breakers it that you isolate your impact so that you don’t need to shut down the entire production.
As a product manager you should be able to advocate the need for circuit breakers in your product.
Feature Flags
All active feature development must happen behind a feature flag. Simply put a ‘feature flag’ is a feature toggle that gives you the ability to turn features of your application on or off easily.
Imagine that despite shift left of quality, bug bashes, and circuit breakers, a fundamental issue gets introduced in your product. And you had a magic wand to turn off that buggy feature in your product so that the team can look at what went wrong with that one feature without impacting the rest of the product. This would help to reduce the impact radius of the blast.
Feature flag is that magic wand. It allows you to control the exposure of your feature and gives you the power to pull the Andon Cord on a feature even after it has gone into production.
Monitoring
Monitoring customer experience in real time is vital. It’s one of the essential requirements to maintain impeccable customer service. You can also use the Andon cord to treat suboptimal customer experiences.
Integrating advanced analytics with the Andon Cord prescribes code improvement techniques to the developers. By constantly using application monitoring to look for defects and by fixing each and every critical defect, you improve coding standards.
As a team it is important to understand the importance of maintaining code quality, which will ultimately reduce the defect count.
If you haven’t built one, then set up the Andon Cord for your product. It may sound like a drag in the beginning however it will accelerate your product development and improve your product quality in the long run.
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