Pulling strings

We can think of "goals", not as targets to hit in of themselves, but aspirational projects, where the constituent steps taken towards this goal as worth doing in of themselves. In essence, "goals" become a proxy for all of the practices we need to make achieve them.

Consider the goal to "deploy code to production mutliple times per day" which requires:

• Comprehensive testing so we're sure the change we're deploying has a low chance of failure
• Monitoring and error logging so that we know if a deployment is causing issues (either direct errors or performance regressions)
• An automated deployment process, because it's unrealistic to spend multiple hours a day deploying software

Looking at lofty goals through this lens can help us make sense of the initial discomfort we might feel. If we understand that the reason we feel uncomfortable is because there are foundations missing, we need to identify what's lacking before moving on. Even if we don't ever end up hitting our goal, we're most likely still in a better place because of all the incremental steps we've taken along the way.