By now it should be pretty clear that most of the advice in our book isn’t necessarily specific to product development.
Our stories are essentially about the art of maintaining a healthy, functional community—any community. You could take our anecdotes, remove the parts specific to product development, and substitute any other sort of activity. We could be talking about a neighborhood club, a church group, a fraternity, or a construction team; the same social problems exist and the same solutions are applicable. Humans are unpredictable and tricky to deal with no matter what the context. Product development has the same community-health issues as any other group endeavor.
So, while you’re out there busily incorporating HRT into your daily work life, keep in mind that it applies to the rest of your life as well.
Who knows? It’s possible that our real calling may be in writing church sermons. But for now we’ll stick to writing software and getting the most out of collaboration. And now you have the power to do that, too.
We’ve covered an awful lot of topics in this book. After you close the cover it may be hard to figure out which parts to embrace in your daily life. After all, what’s the point of reading a book like this if it doesn’t result in some changes in the way you work? What happens now?
Let’s keep things simple. If you remember anything at all about our stories, remember HRT: humility, respect, and trust.
As we explained in the first chapter, these three core traits are the things that need to underlie every social action you make and every relationship you cultivate. And if you look carefully you’ll find that nearly every social problem stems from a lack of one of these traits.
Remember that HRT applies to all your different “spheres” of influence. It applies to you before anything else: these traits affect every individual communication you make. It applies to your team: a culture based on humility, respect, and trust will spend the most time coding and the least time infighting. It applies to the way people lead teams: skilled leaders serve their teams and not the other way around. HRT also applies to the way you interoperate with and survive temporary collaborators outside your team, whether they are nice folks, jerks, or a dysfunctional bureaucracy. And finally, these principles apply directly to the way you interact with the most important group of all—the users of your product.
If you keep HRT at the forefront of the way you work, you’ll have greater impact with considerably less effort. We think it’s the best way to end up spending the most amount of time doing what you love (shipping product) and the least amount of time dealing with social conflicts, bureaucracy, and other human drama.