Passion fruits

If you design software without knowing what actants are, you’re blindfolding yourself for no good reason. Sure, we do stuff with software, but software also does stuff to us. It shapes our actions, frames our expectations and influences how we think about ourselves and others. Often, we stoop to match its meagre capabilities. But it’s just an actant, one we can change. Once you see this, a lot of the bad or silly software-driven outcomes are obviously unnecessary and not very hard to fix. Beth’s piece is a great starting point, do read it.

Years ago, a travel app I worked on became markedly better in a few months. The trick was a swim lane for “passion fruits”. We didn’t add headcount, our testing stack didn’t change, no big initiatives were started, nothing anyone would notice.

Passion fruits = Passion projects + low-hanging fruits. People on the team had stuff they really wanted to do, like better deep linking, location-aware auto-suggest, clearer confirmation messages, etc. None of them fit into our roadmap, but none of them were very big. So we snuck them in. If we had a little extra time, we added it (safely, with tests, fallbacks, toggles, measurement).

And it worked. The app’s many little annoyances were cleared out, one at a time. The “quality of life” improvements moved out of the backlog (at last!) and into production. We delivered the big things we were supposed to and made the little things better each week.

All because of a swim lane? No, all because we recognized that our task board was an actant that was actively shaping our output. The org was always pushing us towards the big new things and never set aside time to get those things to work well together. The board was just mirroring the org.

But we owned the board, and could change it. So we changed how the actant operated, added the swim lane for “passion fruits” (we really did call it that, I promise) and suddenly all that positive change energy in our team had the structure it needed to deliver results.

Had we never heard of actants, we likely would never have thought that a new swim lane could make a difference.