As an individual contributor have you ever had the feeling that you are living in a feature mill, where you have no time to work on anything else but delivering a constant stream of features one immediately after the other? Perhaps you raise concerns about it at times with your leaders, but you find their suggestions (if they have any) as ultimately unworkable, or just seem frustrated with you in response, as if it’s something you should address. Maybe they even institute a practice like “10% innovation time” but in practice you don’t get any time to leverage that innovation time, because, you know, those features won’t build themselves.

Today I presented at the PAYMENTSfn conference in Durham, North Carolina.

Often the business knows before engineers do that the organization has passed the point of there being no acceptable amount of planned down time.

Often the business knows before engineers do that the organization has passed the point of there being no acceptable amount of planned down time.

Often the business knows before engineers do that the organization has passed the point of there being no acceptable amount of planned down time.

It’s not an event in a SaaS companies lifetime that’s marked with a lot of fanfare - but as an engineer it’s incredibly significant - you know when you’ve moved past it because suddenly things become a lot more complicated. Things are HARD. Lots of your skills to date are not transferable to this new world.

It’s often not until you experience severe unexpected down time that the tolerance of the business for such down time is established/tested, often the last time you had significant unplanned down-time is the pre-cursor to the business making the decision (often at the board level) to no longer tolerate planned down time - even though planned and unplanned are not the same thing, to the business (and it’s customers) the impact is much the same.