Plan to Fail
Plan to Fail
Lessons Learned from a Macerator Mishap 💩
I was freakin pissed. I was staring at my macerator (a poop grinder of sorts) on my RV. I was emptying my sewage tank and the macerator was grinding things up and sending the goods 200 feet away to the septic tank, like a champ. But right now the macerator wasn't working at all.
Something had gummed it up and it was dead.
I had imagined this scenario before but had always put it off. After all I had been doing this for months and had not had a problem (ok, one or two close calls). Everything is good until its not.
There is a special part that can go with the macerator that has a gate on it. So if it fails you can cut off the flow of juicy goodness and fix the issue. I just hadn't gotten around to getting it, because I was lazy and everything had been working. Again, everything is good until its not.
The only remedy was to remove the macerator and deal with the flood of shyte that was about to gush forth.
Needless to say I took a long shower that night.
What is the moral of this gruesome tail? What I failed to do is to plan to fail.
As a development manager you will fail.
Your product will fail.
Your team will fail.
But the worst kinds of failures are the ones that you knew what to do. You just waited, not wanting to put the time in to something that would only be needed if the shit hit the fan. I can tell you from experience that in the middle of those experiences you will dream of going back in time and making the small change that would have protected you.
So go right now, fix that little thing that you know you need to fix. Your future self will thank you.
Oh and your team also has these areas that they know about too. Get them talking. Do a premordem and figure out if something went wrong what the cause would have been. Because things will fail and as a manager you are ultimately responsible.
If you liked this, consider subscribing to my Substack. I publish an article about software engineering and software engineering management every Tuesday. If you want even more, consider joining my paid content where I am writing a course in real time about making the jump from developer to manager.