In the last week, I have had several discussions with some really smart technologists, partially focused on what makes technology companies nimble and fast and, therefore, great. In the last article, we discussed hiring 10x people, and especially the way many great employees compound together to create up to 2 orders of magnitude faster companies. However, hiring really smart employees is necessary, but it is not sufficient. What these employees need is independence.

What do you do when you want to move towards more rapid deployment, perhaps as close as possible to continuous delivery, but the culture and incentives push against it? This is the exact issue I have had at several clients over the years. When brought in to improve their operational performance, I found that, with all of them, a major issue was instability due to deployments. The flow looked something like this: