🌱 Freshly planted — a claim and a hunch, not yet a position.
Taleb’s principle: judgment improves when the judge shares the consequences of the judgment. Advice from someone with nothing at stake is systematically less reliable — not because they’re dishonest, but because consequence is what forces contact with reality.
The hunch I want to develop: “you build it, you run it” is skin in the game, operationalized. A team that carries the pager for its own service makes different design decisions than one that hands deploys over a wall. And the QE version cuts uncomfortably close to home: a central test team that approves releases but doesn’t share on-call, roadmap pressure, or the 2am consequences is an advisor without exposure. Embedding quality engineers inside delivery teams isn’t just an org-chart choice — it’s moving the judge into the blast radius.
Open questions to work through here:
- Where should the exposure sit for a platform team whose “product” is other teams’ velocity?
- Does a quality gate without shared consequences inevitably drift toward theater?
- What’s the honest version for leaders — what consequences do I actually share with the teams I set direction for?
Related:
- Build quality in — ownership of quality vs. inspection of it
- Team Topologies — where consequence sits in each team shape
- Psychological safety — exposure without safety is just fear; the two have to move together