(2023-09-09) Cutler Tbm234 Maintenance Ktlo And Bau

John Cutler: TBM 234: Maintenance, KTLO, and BAU. I've always been bothered by how teams use words and phrases like maintenance, keeping the lights on (KTLO), and business as usual. I get what they mean, but there always seems to be a stigma around this work.

This is problematic because work in this category is often the highest leverage/value work a team might tackle.

"Maintenance"

Gardening

In a sense, software is much more like a garden than a mechanical entity like a car.

A product requires constant attention to grow and adapt to its environment (user needs, technological changes, and market trends). It's an ongoing process of growth, adaptation, and care.

But the words we use in software can carry the legacy weight of physical products like cars and factories.

differentiate this from work that is considered "innovative," "strategic," "value-added," or "forward-looking."

Teams routinely try to manage the "mix" between these categories—putting them in discreet buckets and mandating % allocations.

The challenge is that these aren't discreet buckets, yet the words we use (and buckets we use) tend to reinforce unhelpful simplicity on what is way more nuanced.

Finance & New Stuff

Oversimplified buckets have very serious financial and accounting implications. Most conspicuously, companies capitalize "new stuff" or "major enhancements" and recognize those efforts as an asset on the balance sheet.

*There's a huge incentive around premature convergence and success theater. Everyone wants to be a "profit center".

Before you know it, there is a stigma around the percentage of capacity going to the arbitrary maintenance or KTLO bucket.*

This isn't finance's fault. It boils down to having a solid product strategy and a compelling, financially grounded model.

This is not an exhaustive list of dimensions (or a truly serious attempt at a model), but the first factors that come to mind:

Reactive ←→ Shaping

Mitigative ←→ Exponential

Degradation ←→ Transformation

Direct Impact ←→ Indirect Impact

We could probably throw a couple more in to enhance this model, including value curves, bet portfolios, some of the questions here, the risks mentioned here, and leverage and benefit types.

Try this now. Look at work that currently falls under "maintenance" or "keeping the lights on". Using my categories above, or your own categories, categorize the work

Ask yourself, "What might we work on to reduce the amount of low-leverage work we must do?"