Blame the problem, not the person

Day 174 / 366

Much of what I have learned about how to keep a good and healthy work culture has come from my experience working at a startup called Tophatter. It is by far the best place that I have worked at, and it's a shame that it had to close.

At Tophatter, we had a weekly meeting called a Retrospective, or Retro for short. The point of a retro is for the team to discuss what all went well, what went wrong, and what could be done better. This was not just limited to the actual coding or work, but also in general how the team functioned. How well we communicated, how the processes were etc.

One of the rules of our Retro was that when you talked about things that went wrong, or could be done better, you were not allowed to name any particular person. And this was true in the day-to-day work as well. When things went bad, say there was an outage in production, or any part of the code was not up to the mark, we never tried to blame any single person. The line of thinking was always that what could we as a team have done differently in order to avoid the problem in the first place?

This has stayed with me, and I try and pass on this way of thinking to all the teams that work with me. I think it is stupid to point fingers at others and blame them for things being wrong because blaming does not solve anything. What can you do to make things better? That is what you should be asking yourself.