Hey, I was reading about 37signals creating Fizzy, their new product that is a Kanban board with new takes.

And this paragraph caught my attention:

"This approach can go very wrong, and we see it in software all the time. The reason it works for us is that the people building new products are deeply experienced in their craft, but also in Shape Up. They have an intuitive sense for how much time something should take and how to avoid rabbit holes. For instance, Kevin built the stalled feature in two days and then moved on to something else. After two days, we could use it for real and see where it felt right and where it felt off. We made improvements a few times before launch, always based on how it worked in practice. With new products, you figure out what you want by building and using it."

Could you spot the most important word in this paragraph? It's "people".

"the people building new products are deeply experienced in their craft, but also in Shape Up"

When people are mature and capable, process is always less important. It doesn't matter if it's Shape Up or RUP. People are always more important than process, but when people are new to the craft, it becomes a risk as they can make bad decisions. Worse than that, bad decisions that are known to be bad decisions, but they don't know yet because they're not experienced enough.

And that is what makes processes hard. Almost everyone hates to follow processes strictly as they break freedom and autonomy. But also, when we're working with people who are beginners, processes help them avoid common known problems.

So what should we do? We have basically two paths to solve this issue:

1 - Only work with experienced people

2 - Set a process and guide beginners on when to work around the process

To be honest, option 1 is easier and better, especially for the leaders. But also, we don't have only experienced people available all the time, so it's a challenge. And we're not forming new experienced people, so depending on your company's goals, that could be short-term thinking that costs you a high price in the future.

Option 2 is the more balanced approach, but it requires more leadership presence. I gave a talk in 2015 in Rio talking about how processes (in that talk I was calling them "rules") are bad for teams, companies, and ultimately for people. My argument was that processes kill creativity and lead to bad outcomes.

One simple and real example is: "You must get a Taxi when traveling for the company, otherwise we won't refund you". At the time, Uber was just starting in Sao Paulo and it was much cheaper than Taxi, but the company rule said it must be a Taxi. So the company was spending more, people were getting worse service and losing time. But if we allow people to take any transportation, maybe they could also get a very expensive private driver or even rent a car and spend money on parking as well (parking is very expensive in business places in Sao Paulo). So the rule was good enough but not the best optimization possible. For mature people, the decision was clear - Uber was the best option. But do we trust all people?

My goal with that talk was to talk about Trust, and I think that is what this boils down to here too.

I don't think people being experienced or not is the big factor here. I believe the big factor here is: Do you trust that your team is going to try to make the best decision for the company regardless of rules or processes? If you do, I think you should relax the process and let people decide.

In the end, I believe people are always more important than processes. With people here, I mean that people are more intelligent than hard-coded processes, so let them decide the best way and when to follow or when to ignore processes.

Don't impose rules for everything. Keep the rules in place only when really required. Otherwise, you will be like restrooms in public places in Brazil where we need to say "Don't pee on the floor", "Don't get up on the toilet". These rules don't make sense. Don't make everyone follow rules just because of bad actors. When we live life preventing bad actors, our lives and our work become too boring and unsatisfying.

Work should be fun. So enjoy your week and break some rules.