It’s taken me 15 months at GoProposal to break Production, but today… I did it. You create a successful deployment the night before, run your tests, walk away happy and think “well, that was easy”.

But you get the dreaded message from Client Success first thing in the morning.

There seems to be a widespread issue where members can’t access their line items

What? How can this be? It was a routine deployment with no major changes!

No Blame Games

At GoProposal by Sage, we have a “No blame culture” where there is a collective responsibility for our app.

I’ve been around enough teams to know that when the chips are down, people look for a scapegoat. We are not one of those teams.

The most innovative, high performing teams are teams that pull in one direction. It’s not enough to only take collective responsibility when things are going well but to pull together when your app is down for the vast majority of your client base.

Mercedes AMG Petronas F1 Team are a great example of this. They dominated the sport from 2014 through to 2021. When things were going well, everyone celebrated, the team was untouchable. The last two years, their car has not performed to their lofty expectations.

So what did they do? Did they find a scapegoat, publicly chastise them before “relieving them of their duties”? No. As a collective they are taking responsiblity, finding solutions and putting the best people in positions to succeed.

Finding Solutions, Fast

It goes without saying, that when a critical feature of your app is down, you need to move fast. My Lead Developer was the first to respond and brought the issue to my attention immediately.

Rather than chastising me, we recap what changed from last night to this morning before identifying the fault. In this case we were lucky that a quick fix could be applied to our legacy app before we conduct a post incident investigation.

Finding solutions isn’t just resolving the immediate issue, we need to put in additional safeguards and testing in the future, our greatest learnings are from the mistakes we make.

Holding Yourself Accountable

Now, you might be wondering why I’m doing this, even though we have a no blame culture.

Personally, I’ve always believed that a teams greatest strength is accountability. Owning up to a mistake or an oversight goes a long way in being able to trust the individuals to pull through when the going gets tough.

Plus, it never hurts to have an anecdotal story to your name!

At the end of the day, rather than being a collective of individuals, you should be a single unit moving forward, breaking down barriers and tech stacks. If we all muck in, you can achieve so much more.