97 Things Every Programmer Should Know

Chapter 77. Start from Yes

Alex Miller

RECENTLY, I WAS AT A GROCERY STORE, searching high and low for “edamame” (which I only vaguely knew was some kind of a vegetable). I wasn’t sure whether this was something I’d find in the vegetable section, the frozen section, or in a can. I gave up and tracked down an employee to help me out. She didn’t know, either!

The employee could have responded in many different ways. She could have made me feel ignorant for not knowing where to look, or given me vague possibilities, or even just told me they didn’t have the item. But instead, she treated the request as an opportunity to find a solution and help a customer. She called other employees and within minutes had guided me to the exact item, nestled in the frozen section.

The employee in this case looked at a request and started from the premise that we would solve the problem and satisfy the request. She started from yes instead of starting from no.

When I was first placed in a technical leadership role, I felt that my job was to protect my beautiful software from the ridiculous stream of demands coming from product managers and business analysts. I started most conversations seeing a request as something to defeat, not something to grant.

At some point, I had an epiphany that maybe there was a different way to work that merely involved shifting my perspective from starting at no to ...