At one point in my career, I was lucky to cross paths with the Government Digital Service in the UK. I worked on their GOV.UK website, where UK citizens can find government services and information.
During my stay at GOV.UK, I came across their Government Design Principles. The principles help build government services with the user’s needs in mind, as simple as possible.
I love all their 10 principles, and together they are bigger than the sum of the parts. However, this last principle stuck with me for a very long time: Make things open; it makes things better.
We should share what we’re doing whenever we can. With colleagues, with users, with the world. Share code, share designs, share ideas, share intentions, share failures. The more eyes there are on a service the better it gets – howlers are spotted, better alternatives are pointed out, the bar is raised.
GOV.UK Design Principles – Make things open; it makes things better
Throughout my career, I have seen so many problems created by not sharing early and often.
When we think about sharing early and often, it’s common to think about shipping products. The sooner we validate ideas, the sooner we learn, and the quicker we can adapt.
But lately, when I think about the principle “Make things open; it makes things better”, I think of a different set of problems: how information is disseminated internally, and who we involve along the way.
Context is everything. For startups, where speed matters, it’s even more important.
But very frequently people default to withholding information (without malice) and delaying sharing context until it’s ready™️.
That usually means we interpret and distill context before it reaches others for further work and decision-making. At this point, it’s likely been weeks of lost context, which will significantly impair future decisions.
This is especially problematic for engineering teams. When engineering doesn’t get access to context early enough or isn’t part of defining the problem statement, we will likely see a whole world of open questions that weren’t thought through, to begin with.
The natural reaction is to ask questions and push back. Sounds annoying, but it’s symptomatic.
The speed at which we learn and change correlates to the speed at which information arrives at the right place. And how complete the information set is.
No single job family should be the owner of information, nor the ones filtering it so others can do their job.
I default to over-sharing rather than under-sharing. And sharing insights together with raw data is key to enabling others to arrive at different conclusions.
There’s no silver bullet. So share early and share often. And by doing it you’re contributing to a better company culture.
