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No one stands alone. 

Focus on the end result is a beautiful thing. It’s what drives much of our growth. Each of us as individuals must understand and own the desired outcome and use our mind and our skills to bring this to fruition. 

Relying on perfection is committing to failure.

The paradox, of course, is that each of us alone will inevitably fail. Each one of us is flawed. The scoper will forget a business rule. The coder will miss an edge case. The tester will skip a scenario. We will make mistakes. And given that fact, if we depend on an individual’s own ability to be flawless, we will inevitably fall short of our vision.

Where people fail, process saves.

One reason we’ve been able to succeed at the complex projects we have with such a small team, is the emphasis we place on our own internal processes. By investing in an infrastructure that helps to put us in a position to do our best work with a lower risk of failures, we free people up to do what they do best: create. 

Whenever something goes wrong, we need to ask ourselves not who is to blame, but what is to blame? Human mistakes are inevitable, but the process should give us a high likelihood of catching them. When it doesn’t, we need to ask where the process failure was that allowed this to happen and correct it for the future. 

Avoid Single Points of Fault 

One important tenet to this is that wherever success rests on the ability of one person to execute flawlessly, we will fail. In other words, if blame can be assigned to a single person when something goes wrong, the process was flawed. Seek out these single points of failure and find ways to mitigate them through process. Code reviews are one example of this. Critically examining scope all the way through the QA process is another.