Ask your developer

The book “Ask your developer” written by Jeff Lawson, goes around so many things about how companies are evolving and how the presence or lack of presence of technology changes their ability to survive and thrive.

“Ask your developer” is a mindset, very similar to what Simon Wardley calls as doctrine.

What are the characteristics of “ask your developer”?

There are so many things that could tell you that an organization has this mindset:

• The organization does not differentiate between business and IT: all is the same.
• The developers not just copy
• They understand that “build or buy” is not valid anymore; to compete, there is just “build or die”.
• The organization detects a problem, uses technology to understand the issue and uses technology to solve the issue.
• The people of the organization work together in the same direction in different groups, and are able to deploy code for the different situations they have.
• They understand that the software teams are able to make a lot of decisions.
• They understand they have a lot of unused talent in their developers and other technical staff.
• They try to attract talent to their organization with this mindset.
• They understand that engineering is a very creative job.

Wardley’s doctrines table

I personally will add “ask your developer” to the original list of Wardley’s doctrines.