Skin in the Game for Developers

responsibility

Skin in the game is when you get both upsides and downsides of your actions. You can read more about in the Skin in the Game book of Nassim Taleb.

What do developers need to do to have Skin in the Game?

The first thing that comes in my mind is that developers with Skin in the Game cares.

• they care about the product

• they care about the features

• they care about users/customers

• they care about the underlying structure of the code

• they care about the software development process

• they care about automation

• they care about design, UI, and UX.

• they care about bugs in production.

• they care about quick wins

• they care about sales

• they care.

How to improve Skin in the Game in your developers’ team?

Rotate your developers in other important positions like customer support, release management, testing, sales, bug fixes.

Skin in the game developers is responsible.

For any new code produced:

• they add new automated tests.

• they make sure they implemented correctly the business logic

• they run the test before throwing into master or production

• they review other developers code

Benefits of Skin in the Game for yourself

The first benefit of having skin in the game is to become a better developer.

Skin in the game will need more ownership and responsibility of you in many more areas of your company/startup.

You are going to understand the motivation of every issue or code and if that is creating value for the end-users.

You won't accept all decisions made, as you want to find the best decision for the given situation.

You are going to feel the weight of a bad deploy full of bugs. You are going to feel the urgency to fix them.