Continuous Improvement is a Slog

The Temptation to “Stop Everything and Fix It”

Tech debt, bugs, old convoluted code, painful processes. We all encountered one or a combination of these in our lives as engineer. And it’s just natural for us to have the itch to fix them. However, no matter what, new requirements and deliverables keep coming.

If I have a penny for every time I hear an engineer complains, “Ugh, get off my back. Why can’t we stop the deliverables and let us fix stuff properly?” I’d have… a few pennies. (Hey, I don’t have that big of a team)

However, I’ve heard the same sentiment in most of engineering teams I’ve been. Heck, I’ve found myself thinking (and yes, suggesting) the same thing before.

My boss back then was patient enough to explain to me in the simplest way possible: the company still needs to make money. Revenue, customers, and deadlines don’t pause just because the codebase is messy or processes need refining. The reality is: we have to improve while still delivering.

The Myth of the Silver Bullet

We’ve all seen the stories where adopting a new framework / mindset / tech improves someone’s team. Productivity increased, morale boosted, and the product saved.

However, I’ve never seen anything like that. Or to be exact, not instantly. What the stories usually not mention is the time span and the effort needed (and especially, how it feels) between the improvement’s inception and the actual result.

Let’s face it, we all have experienced the envy when looking at other teams or companies. The grass is always greener on the other side. We are human after all.

When trying to implement one of process improvement, I faced something that I did not expect before: the slog.

A Tale of Toyota’s Andon Cord

Toyota’s Andon cord system lets workers stop the production line to fix defects immediately. The idea? Fix it properly now so it doesn’t come back later.

I wasn’t alone when thinking that software development should work the same way. Instead of ignoring small issues, address them before they snowball. Instead of rushing short-term fixes, think about long-term sustainability.

So naively I put a policy forward in my team: every time we receive a report of something not working, we drop everything and gather. The goal was to at least come up with long-term fixes and preventions, and at best fix the thing on the spot.

We even had a Slack bot so that anyone can trigger the “Andon Cord” anytime and let everyone know to gather.

It worked… for the first few issues.

I imagined that in short time I would see the difference in the number of bugs or issues that come in. And oh boy, was I mistaken.

I didn’t take into account that with the amount of reports coming in, we would spend most of our day locked together, addressing those reports. It was common to have a new report popping up while we are discussing the previous one.

Most importantly, I didn’t consider the time needed to work on the fixes and improvements, let alone to actually see the difference it made.

While Andon Cord is great for empowering the team members to speak up and bringing attention to issues, it was not great when we have to stop everything every 5 minutes. In the end, we ditched the “stop the world” thing while keeping the mindset to “flag issues early, plan the long term fix” alive.

So Andon Cord is alive… in spirit.

Embrace the Slog

Real improvement is slow, frustrating, and often invisible at first. But it’s the only way to make lasting change.

So the next time you feel like nothing’s changing, remember:
• The best improvements are small but compounding.
• Fixing things properly today saves bigger problems tomorrow.
• If you stick with it, you’ll look back in months and realize how far you’ve come.

I can say objectively that my team’s product improved over the years. Looking back retrospectively, I could not find one single thing nor a point in time where I can say, “That’s what made the difference.”

We’ve had so many tweaks to both our process and product. We tried out things and discarded those that didn’t work. All while keeping milestones delivered and fixes deployed.

I would forever be grateful for the great team who embraced the slog, who kept thinking, discussing, and working on the improvements (and still do!) for the product and process. That is probably the closest thing to a silver bullet that I have.

What’s one small improvement you can start today?