Depending on who you ask or where you work, the question “What does production do?” can elicit answers that cover the complete spectrum of skills relevant to development or project completion. I find this variety interesting as it allows for various skill profiles to find success in the job, but certainly, there has to be a key responsibility of the role.

I believe the job of production is to help the team be “greater than the sum of their parts”. I often describe production as a force multiplier, “a factor that gives [a team] the ability to accomplish greater feats than without it”. Consider a team of 10 developers without production and that they create value in the project at a rate of 1 units per work period, for a total of 10. Simplistically, adding an 11 dev would increase the teams value creation to a rate of 11. Thus, for a producer to be a better choice than an 11th dev, they will need to improve the teams value creation overall by at least 10% to reach the value creation rate of 11 from the baseline 11 dev team. So how do we gain this 10%?

Engine efficiency of thermal engines is the relationship between the total energy contained in the fuel, and the amount of energy used to perform useful work.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engine_efficiency

A team is like an engine. There is a finite amount of effort the team can give (total energy in fuel) and the overall quality of the project is directly related to how much of that effort can be realized as user value (useful work) in the project. Internal combustion engines are generally between 20-40% efficient, losing the other energy through friction and heat. Our teams are losing efficiency through unclear vision and objectives, context switching, waiting for approvals, over scoping, defects and all the common wastes of software development. Quite simply, any dealignment or confusion in the team is draining your team of it’s precious energy and not producing useful work. Further, given the passionate nature of our industry and that our engine is made of people, not metal, a good bit of energy is lost in the emotions of development and the wear and tear of long crunch periods.

With this in mind, improving 10% seems much more reasonable now. All we must do is remove entropy from the project. Reduce chaos and wrangle the agents that introduce it. Implement clear and consistent process. Manufacture clarity through culture and process.

So, what is production? Well, we are the mechanics on racing car engines, doing everything we can to extract the maximum amount of useful work while ensuring the engine can complete the race. And like any good mechanic, we will depend heavily on our tools. I hope future articles of this blog can help you add tools to your kit.