I Intend to...

The book Turn the Ship Around by L. David Marquet recommends a Leader-Leader paradigm to replace the Leader-Follower paradigm. The Leader-Leader paradigm focuses on all personnel taking ownership over their position rather than just taking orders in a leader-follower structure.

Marquet took command of the USS Santa Fe when it was one of the worst performing submarines in the fleet. Through a series of leadership changes, he transformed the Santa Fe into a top-performing boat. One of the changes he implemented was having subordinates state their actions as “I intend to [action]“ rather than asking the commander what to do. Imagine the following fictitious conversations and think about which relationship you would rather be a part of either as the team lead or developer:

SCENARIO #1:
Team Lead: Is the shopping cart enhancement ready to deploy?
Developer: I finished it yesterday.
Team Lead: Is it ready to deploy?
Developer: Umm. Sure.
Team Lead: Is it tested?
Developer: I don’t know. Ask the test team.
 
SCENARIO #2:
Developer: I intend to deploy the shopping cart enhancement to production.
Team Lead: Is it tested and support team aware?
Developer: Yes, functional, regression, and performance testing complete. Support team is aware.
Team Lead: Any risks or concerns we should discuss?
Developer: Simple isolated change, easy to validate and easy to rollback.
Team Lead: How will we know if we achieved the desired result with this change?
Developer: We’ll do smoke testing after it’s deployed to make sure we can still add and delete items from the shopping cart.

SCENARIO #3:
Developer: I intend to deploy the shopping cart enhancement to production. All testing is complete and support team aware.
Team Lead: How will we know if we achieved the desired result with this change?
Developer: We made usability and performance improvements that we expect to decrease the shopping cart abandonment rate by 5%. We’ll track that metric daily over the next four  weeks.

In scenario #1, the developer does not demonstrate they care about the deployment. In scenario #2, the developer demonstrates they care about seeing their work deployed to and validated as working in production. In scenario #3, the developer demonstrates they truly understand the mission and value of the feature to the business.