You Can’t Question your way to a better Architecture

A Baseball Story

My son plays high school baseball and he hopes to continue playing in college.

When he was young - just starting to play - I coached his team.  At first, as an assistant coach (keeping 6 and 7 year olds on the field can be challenging!) - then as a head coach with a partner, then as a head coach for the team.

The team progressed and did great!  Of course…youth sports are pretty volatile, so some of those wins might just be luck of the draw.  When the team was playing their age 9 season, they won, I believe, 6 out of 8 tournaments they were in.  More importantly, they were having fun.  The players were learning the game and their skills were improving.  The coaches and I - all parents - had, at best, played some high school baseball, and some years ago at that.

When the team entered their age 12 season, it was evident that the team was skilled.  They had developed beyond my ability to coach them.  Did I want to stay with the team?  Of course!  All of the coaches bonded with the players over the years, we had very little turnover, the parents were all great - why would we want to stop coaching?

My staying on wouldn’t have helped the team.  I didn’t know how to take them to the next level.  The team moved to a new organization, with new more experienced coaches.  They immediately upped the skills of the individuals as well as the team as a whole.  

What does this have to do with, well, anything?

I frequently hear and see coaches in the tech space make comments like “well, you don’t have to know how to code, all you have to do is ask the right question.’’

That is wrong.  

You might know how to play the game - you know the rules, how to organize the team, you might even win some - but if you don’t have the skills to take the team to the next level, you are doing them a disservice.

Some teams need some structure. They need to understand how to work together as a team, need to understand how their product works, maybe even talk about ways to plan.  

I have yet to see a coach ‘ask the right question’ that helped teams fix their architecture, fix their tests, or improve their product.  

Turns out, sometimes you need to know when to hand the team over to someone more skilled.