This article was first published on The Next Web on March 25, 2014

Daniel Jacobson (LinkedIn) is the VP of Edge Engineering for the Netflix API. Prior to Netflix, Daniel ran application development for NPR where, among other things, he created the NPR API. He is also the co-author of APIs: A Strategy Guide.

“Get busy living, or get busy dying” – Shawshank Redemption

Building great engineering teams is difficult, but it is also increasingly important as the world in which we live is more than ever driven by software. Because of this growing importance, it is essential for engineering leaders to maintain a culture of innovation within their teams to ensure high performance and to keep the company ahead of the curve.

In high performance cultures like at Netflix, there are basically two outcomes that will play out over time for engineering teams. Either the team will enjoy an upward spiral established by a strong culture of innovation or it will spiral in the downward direction, resulting in an inevitable decay of the team and its products.

Here are my experiences as an engineering leader and how I’ve worked to build a culture around innovation for my teams, virtually at all costs.

The downward spiral

For most engineering teams, it is easy to enter a steady state of development and maintenance as systems get off the ground and mature.

Accordingly, managers often slow or halt hiring as the amount of work is relatively well-understood. As a result, the engineers on the team enter a daily or weekly (or perhaps monthly) ritual of incremental improvements, responding to requests, and fixing bugs.

As engineers churn through task lists, however, they become bored, uninspired, and complacent, resulting in degradation in velocity and/or quality. That degradation will result in more churn around testing and/or support issues, which will further frustrate and bore the engineers while generating more potential for system failures that will increase the churn.

The more churn, the more turnover in staff; the more turnover in staff, the more additional churn. This downward spiral can play out very quickly or it can take quite a while.

In either case, there is a clear direction, it is inevitable, and it has a bad ending.

Upward spiral

The way out of the downward spiral is to make some very difficult decisions that have short-term ramifications for the benefit of the long term. I call this “taking your lumps.”

If you take your lumps now by deferring non-essential work, it frees the team up to think about the long-term and to seek patterns in their work, systems, and operations. Through these patterns, the team can potentially program away a class of work that otherwise would occupy the team’s time on an ongoing basis.

Eliminating a class of work enables the team have more available time in the future to seek other such patterns or opportunities, which will create even more available time.

With the available time, not only is the team further alleviated from the daily churn of reacting to external needs, they are also able to pursue higher order projects that allow the team to make transformative leaps forward rather than churning to keep up or making minor incremental improvements.

Repeated enough, this will eventually become part of the team’s culture, resulting in higher quality work and greater velocity. Unlike the downward spiral, there will positivity around the team that will be infectious and will create a breeding ground for attracting new talent.

Virtually every engineering team will find itself in one of the two aforementioned trajectories. It might not be obvious which way things are headed, but there will be a trend one way or the other.

It is the job of the engineering leader to ensure that the spiral is upward. Here are my 10 philosophies and approaches that I employ with my teams to strive for the upward trajectory:

1. Establish a strong identity

Be very clear on the identity of the team and establish a set of philosophies against which the team can operate. Be stubborn about adhering to the identity. The more that identity gets compromised by one-off requests, the more the architecture weakens, the more churn the team will have to deal with, and the more likely morale will suffer.

Be clear on what you will and won’t do and make sure the team knows these boundaries, lives them, and communicates them to others.

2. Important vs. Urgent

In “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People,” Stephen R. Covey talks about the difference between urgent and important. Engineering organizations can very easily fall into the trap of being highly reactionary to externally imposed requests.

While many of these externally imposed requests are very important (and in fact, even if they are not), they tend to team’s attention as both urgent and important. But there are many other tasks or efforts that are very important despite the fact that they are internally driven and elective.

Understanding this distinction and being able to distinguish which tasks fall into which category is paramount in getting out of the churn and enabling that first critical step: introspection.

3. Introspection

Introspection is the key to innovation. Handling requests from a range of external (or even internal) stakeholders is the natural, easy thing for a team to do. Taking a step back from those requests and looking for patterns across them while imagining what they might look like in the future will give a broader and more impactful perspective.

If the system gets refactored in some other way, will that eliminate a class of requests in the future?  Given how the industry is evolving, can you anticipate weaknesses in the system’s architecture that should be examined now? These are examples of important questions that can help springboard your team out of their everyday churn of satisfying urgent requests.

4. Don’t throw good money at bad

During the introspection process, it is important to be future-oriented. Your team has a lot of functioning code and other system-oriented assets which should be considered.

That said, they should only be considered after evaluating the long-term needs of the team and its relationship to its constituents. Imagine starting from scratch and target that as your outcome. From there, it is much easier to see how, if at all, existing assets can play a role in that future state (or in the transition to get there).

5. Hire beyond your needs

The most important resource to enable introspection is time. Many companies and hiring managers work towards “right-sizing” their teams. That is, they project what the incoming requests will be for the team and attempt to staff the team based on those expectations.

This is perhaps the biggest flaw that a team manager can make when building and operating an innovation team because that will ultimately limit the amount of available time for introspection.

Instead, hiring managers should staff beyond the bandwidth needed for known tasks. This will give the team the ability to swell and contract its focus on such work while continually maintaining a reasonable amount of time towards introspection and innovation.

6. Great engineers NEED to be challenged

If staffing is such that your great engineers are spending the majority of their time handling very tactical work, they will slowly but surely lose interest in the job and eventually leave.

Of course, doing that kind of work is a necessary part of every engineering job, but there needs to be a balance for great engineers to remain happy and excited about their work. Engineers need to also have deep architectural challenges that allow them to think, to stretch their minds, and to have a greater value to the company than just keeping the lights on.

In fact, most of them want to have the freedom to identify and pursue these challenges in a way that help them feel empowered and impactful. That is why engineers get into this field in the first place and if that is not available in their current job for too long, they will find those opportunities elsewhere.

7. Instill a culture of (good) laziness

There are two kinds of “lazy” in engineering: bad laziness and good laziness. Bad laziness is allowing yourself to repeat the same tasks over and over because that is easier than stepping back, looking for patterns, and spending the up-front time to program those tasks away. Manual deployment pipelines or manual tests are great examples. But ultimately, if a human can do it, a computer can (and should) do it too.

This is where good laziness comes in. Great engineers will ultimately be fed up with the arduous nature of the repeated task and seek to eliminate that work from his/her docket.

8. Innovation breeds innovation

Once an initial innovation occurs that liberates the team from some encumbering set of repeated tasks, the team now has some newly available time. That time can be used in any number of ways, but to maximize its utility the team should use that time for even more introspection which paves the way for the upward spiral.

The more such innovations that the team can yield, the more likely the team can yield more innovations. This is the case, not only because of the growth in available time, but also because it eventually becomes part of the team’s culture.

9. Don’t treat your systems like your baby

Many people in the engineering world grow very attached to the systems that they build. It is easy to establish that loyalty as engineers spend a lot of time working on a specific system. In fact, I have often heard people call their systems their baby (I may have been guilty of that in my past as well).

There is a value in growing so attached to the systems in that is does strengthen the bond and builds pride for the team as they strive for excellence with that system. That said, there is a long-term detriment to this as well.

Systems, like virtually any piece of technology, have a limited shelf life. At some point, the system will hit its limit and will need to be overhauled or replaced.

Loyalty to that system clouds one’s objectivity about what is best. We need to be able to treat our solutions as tactics towards a broader goal and if the tactic is no longer effective we need to abandon it.

10. There’s no such thing as maintenance mode

If a system is to go into maintenance mode, it really means one of two things: It is either not an important system anymore (which begs the question as to whether or not it should just be retired outright) or the business function is still important to the company even though the company no longer wants to invest in the system that supports it.

As part of the team’s culture, it is important to aspire to eliminate the idea of maintenance mode from the team’s vernacular.

Maintenance mode has two main detriments. First, it adversely affects the team’s morale and goes against the spirit of great engineers, which is to constantly be challenged. Second, most maintenance systems conflate the idea of supporting a legacy system with supporting its business function.

In fact, the latter is the real goal and an innovative team will seek ways to retire legacy systems in favor of future-oriented systems that still supports the required business function. This is not always easy or feasible, but you should always be seeking opportunities to move on from the legacy system.  Sometimes executing on that migration work is of equal or greater value to pursuing new innovations.

External risks

Ultimately, all of these principles depend on having excellent talent on the team. No amount of leadership can offset the challenges introduced by having the wrong skills or people.

Another risk is that many engineers like to chase the shiny new objects. There is a balance that needs to be maintained between enabling great engineers to experiment, innovate, and identify and pursue challenges with their propensity to play with emerging technologies.

It is also worth noting that there are often external forces that prevent some organizations and/or leaders from achieving the above philosophies. For example, not all companies have enough available resources to staff beyond the needs or they may have a legacy of disparate and unrelated technologies that make it inherently more difficult to find a path out of the churn.

As a result, these philosophies require a strong company-level culture that puts leaders and teams in a position to achieve greatness. If the culture is there, however, these 10 philosophies, if truly embraced, will help springboard your team to being innovative and non-reactionary.

This article originally appeared on The Next Web on September 15, 2013.

“Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.” – Sun Tzu, The Art of War

Over the course of 2013, the API industry has matured a great deal. Not only have we seen many of the major vendors (ie. Apigee, Mashery, 3Scale, Layer7, etc) get acquired and/or receive large rounds of funding, we are also seeing an uptick in new players, new tools and services, new publications, and even a series of API-focused conferences.

Meanwhile, according to a recent survey by Layer7, more than 85% of companies expect to have an “API program” within the next five years. All of this is evidence that the appetite for tools and information about APIs is robust. Accordingly, there is no shortage of people and companies attempting to satisfy that hunger. The question I have amidst this growth, however, is whether the concepts around API strategies being served by some is the right meal for those who are eager to feast on APIs.

The problem: “API Strategy”

The majority of the non-technical conversations in the API industry seem to be focusing on terms like “API strategy” and “API economy.” In fact, I even co-wrote a book called APIs: A Strategy Guide a couple of years ago, further facilitating the use of those words in the API vernacular. There is absolutely a strong case to be made for needing an API strategy for certain situations. But how many companies should really be thinking about their API in that way?

Before continuing, it is worth being clear on what I mean by the terms “strategy” and “tactic”. Bobby Ghoshal puts it nicely in his post, Greeks Gave us Strategy vs. Tactics: Now Understand the Difference where he says, “A strategy is a grand plan, a tactic is a specific measure implemented to push the grand plan forward.” Applied to APIs, if there is an API strategy then it means that API is the product in-and-of-itself. In other words, the API is the target of a distinct business and opportunity (with its own metrics), which will then have a range of tactics to support it.

There are certainly cases where APIs are businesses and where a strategy is appropriate. The most common example of an API strategy is around companies who aspire to build a developer community as a new revenue source or as the foundation of their business. Twilio is an interesting example of such a company. Twilio’s strategy is to offer APIs that tap into their backend services to allow developers to build apps supporting their communication initiatives.

In this case, the API is a strategy, one that is fundamental to the business as a whole. Accordingly, Twilio invests heavily in the API, supporting documentation for it, fostering the developer community, and all of the other things one would expect such a company to do for their public API (and some would suggest that they do this as well as or better than anyone else). Twilio should invest heavily in this — a significant portion of the opportunity is predicated on the success of the API program.

The reality: “API as a tactic”

But most companies should not be trying to set up distinct businesses with their APIs as the focal point. They should not be trying to generate new revenue streams or reach new audiences through such programs. Instead, most companies should be focusing on their core business and then designing APIs that support larger strategy.

In pursuing that route, most companies should not be discussing their “API Strategy,” they should be talking about their API as a tactic in support of their broader business strategy and objectives.

An example that I am very close to is Netflix. In the early days of the Netflix API when the program was targeted exclusively to public developers, the API had its own metrics and its own objectives, all of which were designed to support the primary goals of the company.

In this sense, the Netflix API was a product designed to offer incentives to developers to motivate them to build applications around the Netflix experience. These applications would hopefully reach new audiences to generate new subscribers and/or create new user experiences for existing subscribers that would increase their satisfaction with our service. Although the API was treated as a new product within Netflix, it was still operating under the company’s larger business objectives.

While the original vision was incrementally valuable to the company, the results were not as transformative as originally expected. As a result, we pursued a new approach with the API, using it to drive the larger strategy of device proliferation for our growing streaming business. In this sense, the API was transitioning from a product to a tactic.

Today, Netflix can be watched on more than 1,000 different device types, the vast majority of which are developed by Netflix-employed UI Engineers. The API served as an excellent engineering tactic that allowed us to quickly get on more devices, which in turn allows us to create a better overall experience for our customers.

More changes have since been made with the API. Most recently, the Netflix API team, which used to provide traditional REST APIs to the Netflix UI teams, is now providing content distribution platforms that enable data to be pushed from our AWS backend systems to the devices in people’s homes and pockets. We are no longer truly an API team, we are a team that embraces the differences of the different devices and empowers the UI teams to customize and optimize the request/response models needed for their specific device. In other words, we are now a platform for API development.

All of these pivots within Netflix further demonstrate that our API is nothing more than a tactic to achieve our broader goals. There are no allegiances to a tactical solution. Tactics can (and should) be modified, discarded and replaced as appropriate. Strategies, on the other hand, should have longer shelf-lives, evolving over time but less frequently overhauled.

The majority of companies that are considering API implementations, based on my conversations and experience in the industry, are more like Netflix than Twilio. There are countless examples of companies who have made similar pivots to refocus their API attention towards supporting the company’s primary business objectives. These examples range from media companies (NPR, The New York Times, The Guardian) to financial institutions (PayPal, E-Trade) to social media sites (Twitter, LinkedIn).

Even service companies like Amazon and Salesforce, whose systems are differentiated in part by their APIs, use them as a tactic to provide increased value for the primary business, which is providing robust services supporting cloud computing and CRM respectively.

The bottom line

The key to a successful API program is to know your audience. Your audience is defined by your business opportunity. So, be very thoughtful about the opportunity and then define your API accordingly. In some cases, pursuing the public developer opportunity is absolutely the right thing to do and it may have a tremendous upside (although realizing that upside is quite rare).

However, if your opportunity is truly to support a broader business objective, then launching a public developer program is not likely to yield large dividends. It is more likely to come with increased costs and risks that will weigh down your returns, dilute your resources for the larger opportunity, and distract you from the real prize. Instead, focus all of your energy on building a great system that helps you optimize for the larger goal. And don’t be married to that system as it is nothing more than a tactic.

Ultimately, if you know your audience, you can define a strategy and then design the right tactics. Otherwise, brace yourself for a very slow route to victory or, more likely, a noisy defeat.

This post originally appeared on The Next Web on September 15, 2013.