Cutting or highlighting?three days beforeTalking with one of my wise colleagues, we arrived at this neat…Veering toward first-order effects

Live as our customer2023This principle is something that feels very intuitive at first blush, but…Build a thing to build the thing2023When building new products, there’s always a weird tension between making something…Have you ever driven a car that pulls to one side? It’s often subtle, but after a while, the counter-steering effort becomes impossible to ignore. This metaphor comes to my mind whenever I encounter a common developer experience pattern: the veering toward first-order effects.

Polarity-based API layering2021While discussing API design, one pattern that caught my eye was polarity-based…

Developer surface2021I mentioned this concept before, and I feel like it’s worth expanding…Doers, Thinkers, and Magicians2023I’ve been reflecting on my experiences of working with developers and developer…What the heck is 3P?2021I hear folks using the terms “3P,” “1P,” and even “2P” or…To set the context a bit more, let’s arrange the effects of producing developer surfaces in two orders. The first-order effects relate to producing the developer surface. When we ship an API, we want it to be adopted, to be used broadly. Thus, when we measure first-order effects of our efforts, we look at the API adoption rate, developer satisfaction, etc.

Shadows and Curses2022The second curse can be seen as the interplay between “ 🔮…The productification trap2021Picking up on last week’s 3P insight, I want to share some…The second-order effects relate to developers producing user experiences using our developer surface. At the end of the day, an organization that invests into shipping APIs does so — intentionally or not — to influence the overall state of user experience in some way. When we measure second-order effects, our metrics will likely track changes in the user experience. Does using our APIs result in products that are more secure, performant, accessible, etc. for the user?

Based on what I’ve seen working with developer experience teams throughout my career, there’s a pronounced pull toward first-order effects. They are easier to measure, have a shorter feedback loop, and are more familiar to folks accustomed to shipping consumer products. Even if a team sets out to influence the state of user experience at the beginning of their journey, the appeal of relative immediacy of first-order effects is so strong that the original intention often gets left behind.

Separating cargo from the train2023I’ve been puzzling over a problem that many engineering teams face and…Vision-oriented and impact-oriented mindsets2022Impact-minded folks tend to fall into the trap of opportunism. When I…Something will get optimized2021Complex adaptive systems tend to make it difficult to make guesses about…Rigor and shared mental model space2021Alex Komoroske has another great set of new cards on rigor and…A common symptom of forgetting to counter-steer toward second-order effects is the loss of strategic flexibility within a larger organization. When the first-order effects become the means onto themselves, they tend to get entrenched in a local maxima of developer expectations, stuck in an optimizing loop. An organization that contains teams stuck in that particular way feels like it is unable to do anything about it: everyone is seemingly doing “the right thing,” and prioritization exercises quickly devolve into peanut buttering. When something like this is happening, it’s a good hint that the concept of second-order effects got rolled into a dusty corner of the team’s shared mental models space, or ejected altogether.

Intention and shared mental model space2021Hamilton Helmer pointed out this amazing connection between intention and shared mental…The story of belongingthree days afterNext in my adventure across the coherence narrative realm is the story…Stages of customer-centric maturitylinks here, 2021While riffing on customer-centric mindsets and the veering toward first-order effects pattern,…To counter-steer, organizations must exert conscious effort to keep second-order effects in the shared mental model space. Whether it’s constantly pointing at them during the all-hands, setting up the metrics structure to reflect user experience shifts, or even just reminding about the unyielding force that — like that darned car — never quits pulling, it’s an investment that’s well-worth the price.