Prioritising Company Profits Isn't Evil
In many projects I've worked on, I've often heard the argument, "they always prioritise stories that increase company profit". This is often said as if it's always the wrong decision, or as if the people doing it are inherently evil. It is as if they worked against the team.
By they, we mean business stakeholders, project managers, producers, monetisation managers, product owners and similars. These are people who have been hired and are held accountable for increasing company profits and decreasing costs.
Always' is a strong word, and my experience tells me that it's usually not the case. But most of the times this argument is true - companies do prioritise increasing their profitability.
I believe that one of the main responsibilities of the development team is to use good arguments to prove that it makes sense to invest in refactoring, bug fixing and other tech tasks.
To convince people to prioritise tech tasks, you need to find a way to connect tech tasks to profitability.
My advice is to speak the same language, the language of money. If you see the need to refactor, you should be able to explain why it matters, how it will help the delivery speed, quality, maintainability, scalability… Why refactoring it now and not later will be in the companies interest. The same can be applied to bug fixing, upgrading libraries, migrating to new servers, and countless other examples that come to mind.
EX:
Business stakeholders understand that:
1. Delivering today means you start making money earlier.
2. Taking less time to deliver makes us spend less.
If you need an argument to invest time in writing automated tests, explain that it will be faster than running the tests manually. Over time it will increase confidence in making changes to the existing code. Mid to long term we will be able to ship more in less time. We will be able to scale the team without scaling manual testing.
Remember, customers and players don't care whether you have automated tests or if your tech stack represents the bleeding edge of software development. They want what they pay for: to play their game, to watch their favorite tv shows, to book a hotel room and be able to checkin. Pleasing the ones who buy the goods is what keep the company running and the reason why the company can pay a salary. It is extremely important to keep the team morale high and invest in developer experience, but it has to be always aligned with the company objectives. Money is not malum in se evil in and of itself - but the methods used to make the money and how it's spent can be.
***The attached image is a random photo I took in 2018 while testing some GDPR features on a PlayStation 4.
Enjoy life,
Leonardo Ribeiro Oliveira
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