Weston A.'s Key Ideas from Ask Your Developer
by Jeff Lawson

• Off-the-shelf software is for general purposes and does not give an edge over your competitors.
• Businesses need to become more software orientated to gain that edge. You need to build your own software or die.
• To stay on top of competitors, you need to innovate. To innovate, you need to experiment. Experimentation is the prerequisite to innovation.
• You need to ensure that there's tolerance for failure - both personally and organizationally - it's the primary key to unlocking innovation.

An open learning environment is where the company is receptive to not having all the answers, is comfortable with uncertainty, and strives to get better every day.

It means being flexible instead of rigid and having a culture where people continually seek the truth. You want knowledge and truth to win, not politics.

Ask your developers what happens after an outage. 

• Is the person to blame or the process?
• Are people encouraged to learn quickly, even at the risk of making mistakes?
• Do you provide venues for learning from each other and even take risks by giving younger leaders the reins to parts of the business?

A company's structure built on teams of around ten people is a way to scale up a company without losing the urgency, focus and quality of talent that characterises a startup by building a large company out of what are essentially many startups.

• "Single-threaded" leaders have only one thing on their mind - how their team can win.
• They are empowered to make their own decisions and be responsible for them.

Make sure your customer feel you're on their side.

Encourage developers to talk directly with customers, listen on a call or attend a meeting with customers regularly to get a human connection with the customer and understand their problems better.

Ask your developers what customer problems are they solving/working on?

The core of Agile is the ability to move quickly and easily, change direction quickly and respond to changing inputs.

A Product Manager or leader needs to question the following:

• Ask your developers whether they want product managers to be gatekeepers or facilitators of customer interaction? Do PMs view their role similarly?
• Do they collaborate to groom road maps coming from a shared customer understanding, or do they divide and conquer where PMs know the customers and engineers know the code?