Rick LaPlante's WebLog

Transparency, snowmobiling, and other potentially dangerous, but rewarding endeavors…

I like to snowmobile… fast… high… in powder… on a cliff.  Dangerous, but definitely worthwhile.  When I get to the top I sit and look at the world around me and get to take it all in.  Being in the outdoors to me is the best place to be.  Sometimes I’m with friends and the camaraderie is the reward. Sometimes it’s just my family (ok, they aren’t on the cliff, more like rolling hills) and the “together time” playing in the snow is invaluable.

When I’m not outside fishing or snowmobiling, I run the Visual Studio Team System.  This has led me to starting another potentially dangerous, but ultimately rewarding endeavor – transparency in a commercial software development and release process. How is transparency dangerous?  Tom Yager from InfoWorld captures the essence of the danger (and why we should do it anyway) in a good article you can find here.  The short version however is

“Most enterprise development tools vendors have remarkably little interaction with developers. That grows from two principles that guide the tools market: Developers don’t make buying decisions, and it’s impossible to make any two developers happy. For PR’s sake it’s a good idea to create a forum or a newsgroup for developers to complain to one another, but for sanity’s sake, don’t let anyone from the company participate in it.” – Tom Yager InfoWorld 6/18/04

But why is transparency so important (enough to risk metaphorical life and limb as it were)?  Because we’re in this business to ultimately increase the productivity of, and the satisfaction of our customers.  In some businesses this is relatively easy because you sit across the table from your customer when you sell to him/her.  You can have coffee with them, understand their problems one on one.  When you have a 1-n supplier to customer ratio where n is small, this works well.  But when n = 6,000,000 you have to start thinking differently.  Short but true story…  I was interviewing a person who had spent many years as a consultant for a program management job in my team and I always ask “how do you figure out what the customer wants?”.  He was amazed by this question.  He said “you simply ask them when you meet with them”.  I pointed out that there are about 6 million of them around the world and they all want something at least slightly different.   He said “oh”.  We didn’t hire him.  Not because he wasn’t right that you need to “ask them”, but because he didn’t show any initiative in coming up with the solution of how to do it in a meaningful way.

As do most major software vendors (and in fact most major companies), we do lots of surveys to figure out the state of the market, what customers want, how they perceive value, etc.  These are quantifiable (so the research folks say anyway) results.  What we seem to miss sometimes is more of the qualitative, ad hoc, passionate engagements with customers.  This data is not necessarily quantifiable or “projectable” onto a large population, but valuable none the less because of the ability to gauge passion and importance much more tangibly than “user checked box 7 in a 1-10 scale”.  Transparency to me is a 2 way communication about what we’re building, how it works (or doesn’t) in your environment, what you’d like to see, what you don’t like (hate?), what we are doing right, etc.  I used to wonder what passion would look like on the web until I saw the petition (or here for the summary) from Peter Provost on what we should include in all versions of Visual Studio.  It spun up numerous threads on the topic including a different point of view from Dana Epp.  Do we read this stuff?  Yep, this and a lot more every day.  Do we let it influence our actions?  I believe we do.  Sometimes it’s in the form of taking the time to explain the rationale and engage in more discussion, sometimes it takes the form of changing what we were planning, and sometimes we are going to agree to disagree.  But we will work hard to be visible, understand the feedback, and provide much more transparency into our thinking and “mental model” behind these types of decisions.  And I promise we will try and keep the “marketing” spin out of it.

Someone recently ask me “aren’t you just borrowing this idea from the open source movement”.  To which I always answer “sure, its a great idea”.  One of the most impressive things about open source to me is the community involvement and the transparency of the endeavors.  Once I asked an IBM employee that worked on the Eclipse project (a dev) how they could turn around builds so quickly and he said roughly paraphrasing “…my current boss, most likely my next boss, and all my friends know what I said I’d do because it’s right there in the specs on the web.  If I miss my dates, everyone knows”.  As much as some might argue that (as Tom points out in his article) “familiarity breeds contempt”, I believe that transparency breeds accountability, understanding, and ultimately more buy-in to what we are trying to accomplish together.

So with this, I’m excited to enter the world of the blogging.  I will try and update this blog with answers to interesting questions I get from you all, hot topics around the Team System, and with pointers to articles or blogs that I think have an interesting perspective (pro or con).  Every once in a while I might even try and find a way to slip in a picture of my snow machine in the Cascades or Rocky Mountains… (this took a while to dig out near the Continental Divide in Wyoming!)

-Rick

mailto:rickla@microsoft.com