The Value Flywheel Effect: Power the Future and Accelerate Your Organization to the Modern Cloud

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Multiple award-winning CTO, researcher, and bestselling author Gene Kim hosts enterprise technology and business leaders. We talk about creating space for innovation. If you have a problem-prevention culture, you’re removing a lot of busy work. Your teams can focus on innovative things and help your business succeed because they’re not fixing disasters, managing outages, or chasing their tail trying to keep things alive.That’s quite hard to explain to senior people. If you want more innovation, you need to do more boring architecture. Because one feeds the other. Do you want all your best people firefighting? Or do you want them to help you grow in the marketplace? Or have your best people do architecture so everybody can innovate? Many organizations reward teams for fixing problems. An alternative model should be to create a culture of preventing problems: reward the teams that use well-architected and strong engineering practices to prevent issues from ever occurring and lead to more reliable systems in the long term. The flywheel effect is a model used by businesses to ensure an incremental change in growth and performance in their operations, finances, and other functions by leveraging the results of the efforts put in previous cycles. This enables a business to build momentum in every cycle and achieve better results. However, this cycle becomes a virtuous cycle only if the result of a cycle becomes a positive one and if it doesn’t then it can lead to a vicious cycle. Having two phrases or two terms for these things is essential. And that there’s a good definition for them. Let’s dig into them one by one.

Wardley Mapping with the Value Flywheel - The Serverless Edge Wardley Mapping with the Value Flywheel - The Serverless Edge

This post is a transcript of the 2021 DevOps Enterprise Summit presentation by David Anderson and Mark McCann. You can view the full video here. Problem prevention culture is critical. But one of the significant challenges is that silent excellence can be recognized or unrewarded. So you must be careful that you have enough people who understand what good looks like, reward it, and realize it appropriately. You don’t want to fall into a superhero ‘save the day’ mindset! If you invested in problem prevention culture, superheroes do not need to come in and save the day! You need to start quantifying the value in the system, the ROI, the performance and how long does it takes to make a change. Do you have people that can change that system? And factor in developer experience and happiness. Serverless isn’t easier, but it is better David Anderson: So let’s kind of walk through each of these four phases. The first is purpose. Rather than me rant on, Mark, why do you think the purpose is important?David Anderson: So we’ve covered the value of The Flywheel Effect [inaudible 00:14:19] Wardley Mapping. So let’s just do a brief intro on mapping. We explain most, but the important part of Wardley Mapping is this value access along the bottom. We’ll describe what that is, but first to illustrate it, if you think of computers and companies… In the 1950s, having a computer was novel, and that was stage one genesis. It was very rare to have a computer in a company. By the seventies, companies built their own computers and got ahead. The custom built computers to give them capability, that’s stage two. Custom built. In the nineties, computers were everywhere. They were getting better, more refined, there was a boom. That’s stage three, getting that product phase. And now stage four, they are a commodity. You don’t even really buy them anymore. You rent them as a utility, which we call the cloud. Then the second thing is you need enabling constraints, as Mark loves to call them. And that’s where you set up your guardrails so that it’s safe for people to experiment and go the direction you’ve set. They know there’s a maximum level of damage that they can cause.

What is the Value Flywheel? - IT Revolution

Mark McCann: My name is Mark McCann. I’m also an engineer and cloud architect, and I’m passionately pursuing serverless-first and engineering excellence. The most important thing is that you need to have alignment on direction. So you need to make sure that everybody there knows where they’re going. That’s the very first and most important thing. And that’s what most people skip, because if you don’t tell people the direction, everyone will just head their own way. And it’ll all actively work against itself, because it becomes a competition.

David Anderson: And remember, challenge is a good thing. It’s not bad. Challenge always helps you get to a better place. Stage three is next best action. Mark, what’s your thoughts on this one? Patience. This is a long game, and you’ve chosen a strategy that looks slow at first, and builds into an invincible behemoth over time. Own it. Mark McCann: Then finally, the observations. We use these observations really to drive, “Well, what are we actually going to do? What is this map telling us? What actions is it compelling us to start thinking about?” The observations we have here around, that increased the attendee-speaker interaction. The virtual platform has created a new value proposition. A speaker to attend the interaction is now easier, so we probably should do something about that and start capitalizing on that. The well architected practice helps problem prevention. Failure isn’t an option on a virtual conference. You need this to be up and resilient and highly available. So the platform needs to be very robust and you don’t want to custom build that for a few extra features. You want to basically leverage and do your homework, but leverage a class capability that already exists out there that has those well architected characteristics that you need to deliver a compelling virtual event.