Our mind is trained to hope and prepare for the best but that’s slightly off from the reality. Not everything goes as per the plan and as a manager, we must plan for things which are unexpected.
Recently, at The Good Glamm Group, we completed a major database migration and infra change for the primary DBs. The goal was to carry this exercise with Zero downtime. We failed 4-5 times in our POC and we reached a stage where the chances of failure were less than 1%.
In this case too, we prepared for the worst i.e. 1% and ensure that our system is ready to tackle that 1% failure. The activity was finally completed without any downtime and any additional failures. This kind of preparation gave us confidence in the whole process.
In a development cycle, you will come across many instances where you need to be prepared for the worst and a fail-safe must be built along with a new feature. It can be a feature flag or some kind of phased roll out or A/B test. These all are different methods to measure impact of the feature and in case of failure, you can easily either turn it off or have a way to reverse the action in no time.
So ending with what Maya Angelou stated “Hoping for the best, prepared for the worst, and unsurprised by anything in between.”
This is Guru Mantra. Preparing for the worst is the key here.
This allows you to take moonshots.