A bias for action is the secret to moving fast

Sep 21, 2021 · Comments Career

I recently celebrated my 3rd anniversary working at Ionic. This one is particularly special since I’ve now lived and worked in Madison, Wisconsin, as long as Seattle, my previous residence. Time has flown by, and with the struggles of the pandemic, I never got around to writing a 2nd-year anniversary post! However, you can check out my 1st-anniversary post here, where I detail how a Twitter tweet landed me a dream role.

I’ve grown the most in the past three years of my career, so I thought I’d do something different this time around by sharing three lessons learned from three years at Ionic. First up, I explore why I think a bias for action is the secret to moving fast.

Lesson One: A Bias for Action

Have you ever wondered how Netflix, Facebook, and other top-tier software engineering organizations ship to production hundreds of times per day?

It’s a bias for taking action. Make decisions quickly, then take action immediately. Yes, mistakes may get made, but they can be rolled back or swiftly adjusted.

I thought that production statistic was exaggerated until I joined Ionic. I was proud of my work methodology in previous roles: meticulous attention to detail and lots of upfront planning. Slower, yes, but it always resulted in successful execution.

The problem with this approach is that I wasn’t reaching my full potential. It’s not just that the volume of work I created was much lower than it could be. The faster you ship, the quicker you learn, and the faster you can react and adapt to change. The result? New insights, new customers, better products, and increased revenue. Execution speed impacts output, learning, and the bottom line.

However, before you can move fast, a deep understanding of the subject matter is required. At Ionic, this includes the web development ecosystem and hybrid (Web Native) app development. It took quite a while for me to achieve the level of understanding as my peers (at least one year of intense study), and I’m always learning something new, but once I got there, my writing and app development speed increased dramatically.

If you’re struggling to move fast, go back to first principles. Master them, then build slowly from there. Take your time - go slow to go fast.

Making Strategic Decisions Quickly

When it comes to making strategic decisions quickly, excellent writing is the answer. What’s worked best at Ionic is Amazon’s writing management strategy using written narratives to present ideas. You should read the article, but to summarize, writing down ideas forces you to think clearly, and clear thinking leads to thoughtful arguments as you cover all aspects of the decision to be made. After passing several pages of clear ideas to your team, you can collectively make a well-informed decision quickly.

As I can personally attest, it takes a lot of practice to become proficient. I was inspired after learning about Amazon’s approach but was immediately overwhelmed trying to capture all of my arguments at once. The result was painful: writing one sentence or paragraph then editing it until it was perfect. Not only was that slow, but I’d often have to rewrite it while in the editing process after realizing my ideas had changed since starting.

The key is to write an outline structuring your thoughts first. Get the core ideas down, then write the first draft as quickly as possible. After that, you can edit until it’s perfect. Pairing this approach with subject matter expertise means you don’t need to spend hours researching, planning, or getting distracted.

Developing Software Quickly

Taking action in software development means leveraging modern tooling to enable fast feedback loops. At Ionic, we use a combination of Vercel, GitHub, and web development expertise to ship at the speed of light. Open a new branch, commit a change, then Vercel auto-generates a web preview URL so you can view the change live in the browser. Once the work is ready for review, we open a PR on GitHub. Vercel’s web previews are embedded right within the PR, allowing for sharing and approval from anyone on the team. Merge the change to main then it’s live in minutes.

When it comes to small changes such as spelling mistakes in documentation or website bugs, we skip the PR ceremony, committing directly to main. Most of the time, it’s OK to be a bit “reckless” as docs and sites can evolve faster than traditional products. And, when was the last time you searched through commit history?

These workflows are one of the most impactful changes in software development in recent years, simply due to the incredible productivity and collaborative gains they’ve unlocked. If you’re a software developer, you owe it to yourself to get up to speed on these modern continuous delivery techniques.

Removing Barriers to Moving Fast

You can attempt to make important decisions and build cool software quickly - either a plan put into action or software released into the user’s hands - your work doesn’t matter until it ships. Unfortunately, this crucial last step of publishing content or deploying software is often jammed up by tedious organizational processes or other barriers.

Increasingly, powerful low- and no-code tools accessible to everyone regardless of technical ability are the solution. Logging tickets for simple changes that the IT team won’t look at for days? Thankfully a frustrating thing of the past. One game-changing example from Ionic is our 3rd party content management system. Anyone on the marketing team can deploy new web pages, run A/B tests, and publish new content like articles, blogs, videos, case studies, ebooks, and more without getting the web team involved. If it’s not accessible in the CMS, it’s on GitHub. Need to fix a spelling mistake, update a product’s branding, or correct outdated documentation? Submit a PR. In effect, this empowers all team members, regardless of role, to ship changes to our customers as fast as possible.

Small Changes, Large Impact

After putting a bias for action into practice organization-wide, small changes add up quickly. Each development team is shipping new features, and the DevOps team is improving software development pipelines that compound across the entire organization. The web team creates new compelling website experiences that draw in new customers, and the marketing team publishes new articles, blogs, and landing pages whenever they please.

A bias for action is the secret to moving fast. What’s your secret to moving faster?