Standards
Excellence is never an accident
I’m fortunate to have worked on some exceptional teams. One thing these teams had in common was high standards for how the work should be done. Each standard is unique to the team and company. And some standards are more explicit than others. But excellence is never an accident. Extraordinary results are impossible unless you deliberately hold yourself and those around you to raise the bar.
The first time I saw this made explicit was at Faire. In 2020, we held a leadership training exercise in which each team wrote down its standards. This was centered around reading Bill Walsh’s book The Score Takes Care of Itself.1 The process forced us to reflect on the behaviors that led to team success and codify them clearly and succinctly. My manager, Daniele Perito, set an example I would bring to Instagram and Inventa.
My standards of excellence have evolved during my career. Now, I keep them on a publicly available document here. Some I picked up from past bosses, and others I came up with organically. Collectively, they reflect how I believe great work gets done day in and day out. These standards apply regardless of role, level, or experience.
I adapted these standards for my team at Inventa. We were almost 30 people, spanning Data Science and ML, Analytics Engineering, Data Engineering, and Analytics. The standards set a clear bar that helped the whole team do the best work of their careers. If you ask anyone on that team, they will agree that “the standards” were our most important document. They would also say its clarity helped them know what was expected of them to meet our high bar.2
Standard of Excellence
Use and enforce the 15-minute rule. If you don’t have a path forward to solving a problem after 15 minutes of investigating yourself, ask your teammates for help.
Ask for help in public and encourage others to do the same. Rather than getting help one-on-one, enable others to benefit from your questions and the answers you receive.
Share your lessons and best practices. Be deeply committed to a culture of teaching others what you've learned and what has made you successful.
Go for the 80/20 solution, almost always. If you don’t know whether you are working on an 80/20 solution, seek help from the team.
Ensure the 20% you do implement is of abnormally high quality. Take pride in your work, its details, and performance.
Fight accidental complexity relentlessly. The dangers of complexity are hard to overstate. If not controlled, it spreads, even when following standards four and five.
Create leverage for the team by eliminating toil. Identify problems slowing the team down and strive to leave things in a better state than you found them.
Take ownership. Negativity and complaining are poisonous. Take responsibility and work to fix things rather than ignoring problems or blaming others.
Do more than check the box. Think through your work's edge cases, explore possibilities, try to see around corners, and spot-check results.
Be reliable. When you commit to something, never let it fall into a black hole of uncertainty. Communicate issues and risks early and often.
Read the label. Don’t rely on second-hand information when you can go to the source, whether that’s an intern, the docs, a database table, or the codebase.
Rise to the occasion. We promote a culture of sustainable performance, but when our work demands bursts of incredible effort, we seize those opportunities.
Recognize your limits. Tell your manager if you’re continually working too much or on too many things. This is a sign of self-awareness and maturity, not weakness.
Be long-term patient and short-term impatient. Understand that it will take years to build our company while addressing short-term tasks with ferocious urgency.
Be kind. The work is hard, and we all have a lot to learn. Treat each other with kindness and respect, assume good faith, and expect the same in return.
https://whatgotyouthere.com/the-score-takes-care-of-itself-bill-walsh/
The bonus of a written set of standards is in recruiting. You can give a potential candidate a clearer picture of what kind of team they would be joining. This filters out people who wouldn’t be a fit for the way you work. It also helps new hires succeed by guiding them on how to behave for success.