Think Like an Agency
What would your team do differently if your job was to make sure the red phone never rings? Think like an agency, and act as if you have to earn your budget every week.
At our agency, every client got a red phone. It wasn't a real phone, just a direct line to us, any time, for emergencies. The message to our teams was: make sure it never rings. The habits that came out of that kept our agency alive, and they turned out to be good habits for any team building software.
Think like an agency. Act as if you have to earn your budget every week, because the practices that keep a client happy are the same ones that make the software better.
One of our red phone calls came from a team that was doing great work, shipping on schedule and committing code every day. The problem was that nobody at the client knew it. That one was purely a communication failure.
We also get into:
- Why your sponsor should get the credit, even when the New York Times leaves your name out
- How building for the handoff makes you write better docs, tests, and decisions
- Why "the dashboard's green" isn't an answer to "why haven't we shipped?"
- "You can't argue with working software," plus two tips for better demos
- How phase one keeps growing and never ships, and how a phase two list stops it
