v10.3: Toyota Way

I am a big believer in the Toyota method. I think they have built some amazing cars and technology along the way. While they are considered slow and boring, the truth is their cars are reliable, and their manufacturing is focused on quality and, from an outside perspective, low-stress. These are all ideas we can get behind versus the high-stress, leader-led environments of Silicon Valley. Don't get us wrong, founder-led companies can create massive innovations quickly. But the problem is that these companies largely become rudderless if the founder isn't paying attention.

While Tesla created some great cars while Elon was paying attention, they have been outcompeted in a lot of markets by BYD, with innovation grinding to a halt while the founder chases another dream. This is a fault of the founder-led company: it's at the whims of the founder.

Another fault lies in companies that are project-based. These companies are constantly looking to build new features and products that start limiting the core needs of the service. This also leads to enshitification: new products that no one really asked for get piled on instead. This is essentially the Microsoft-versus-Apple comparison, where Apple adds features gradually over time to a small set of existing products, while Microsoft, a product-manager-driven company, moves from one area to another, never finishing their existing products while trying to do it all. While Apple maintains gradual, continuous updates that add small incremental improvements, Microsoft takes a big-bang approach, leading to software that oscillates between people loving it and people hating it. Apple takes its ideas from Jobs' Zen Buddhism, while Sony takes its quality and gradual-improvement cycle just as seriously. Whatever the challenges people have with Apple, their products work for the most part, and it's when they rush design — like Liquid Glass — that it gets them into trouble.

I want opsZero to be a Toyota!

DevOps is hard, it is stressful, every company does it differently, and most companies, when they are looking for a DevOps company, are looking for a partner that they can trust for the long term — a company that will be around. In this arena, being a product company is hard because companies want people, not products.

So we are going to try something completely different from all the tech startups in the Bay Area. We are going to focus on quality!

To achieve this, we are going to do something that is completely different from traditional product development practices. We are going to focus completely on managing our daily Standard Operating Procedures, optimized around our Flywheel. A company is basically a cooking recipe: throw in a little bit of finance, HR, sales, marketing, and support to deliver whatever it is your company is producing, and voilà — that's the recipe.