How and why to hit the brakes.

Brakes get a bad reputation.

Bikes, scooters, cars, and ATVs all have brakes. 

Brakes help you slow down or stop.

They feel protective. Restrictive. Limiting.

They hold you back.

And when that's the story, then why would you ever want brakes for

- Your data team?

- Your career?

- Your business?

Here's why you want brakes.

Brakes are about agility and managing complexity. The majority of the time you use brakes is not to stop, it’s to adjust to a complex environment around you.

When riding a mountain bike on a dirt single-track trail, I rarely use brakes to come to a stop. But I constantly tap brakes to gain control and navigate through tight, sharp, steep, rough, or uncertain sections of the trail.

Overall, my brakes allow me to go faster, with better control, and a higher success rate.

But if you think of brakes as something that will slow you down, stop you, or get in your way you will be looking for ways to remove or avoid brakes.

Rather than embracing them.

What do brakes look like on your data team?

- Pull request approvals, deployment gating, or code reviews.

- Pipeline failure process and auditing.

- New data request prioritization and justification requirements

- Continuous Deployment of code changes to new environments

The tasks, processes, and habits that help you interact successfully with complex environments - either code, people, or data - are your brakes.

They aren’t there to slow you down. Or stop you.

They are there to help you go fast in a challenging world.

What do brakes look like in your day-to-day on your data team?

I’m here

Sawyer