One of the most high-leverage work in a technical organization is building shared libraries or frameworks. A common library, a piece of code that can be used as is, or a framework, a system that codifies certain decisions and allows further work to be built on top, has the opportunity to benefit many people at once. Not only that, they also institutionalize shared knowledge, put knowledge that’s in people’s head in code for future employees. And of course, there are other benefits such as possibly open-sourcing such work, which comes with its set of benefits to hiring and on boarding.

Of course, there are risks with such a venture. The biggest risk is of course the value risk; that the work goes unused by other teams. That is bad enough, but sometimes it gets worse. Sometimes the adoption comes, but the work instead of enabling teams, hinders them. It gets in the way of actual work, the benefits of standardization is overshadowed by the pains of integration and customization.

So how do we make sure our shared work, be them libraries or frameworks, achieves its goal? In my experience, there are 3 principles that separate successful shared projects from failed ones. Two of them are about how to build the project, and a third one about how to get it in hands of others.

Start with a Real Project

Start with the origin. The ideal way to come up with a shared tool is to extract it from an actual project. This seems straightforward enough. The biggest benefit of this approach is the framework has an immediate customer, so its creators are incentivized to solve actual problems, for actual people. In practice, the most important value comes from the “developer ergonomics”, or essentially the usability of the project is automatically improved. This is basically the cornerstone of the agile movement anyway.

Take Rails, which has been extracted out of Basecamp, a project management software. Or Django, again which was extracted from a content-management system built for a local news site. These two frameworks have different cultures, but they attack the same problem; how do you make sure your developers are more productive?

I realize this way of working is not always easy, or even possible For example, it’s easier to imagine a front-end library like Bootstrap being extracted from Twitter’s internal UI, than, say a library used for internal communications platform. But it is possible.

Keep It Small

The second way to ensure success in a shared product is to keep the surface area as small as possible. In other words, the shared project should try to provide value as soon as possible. In practice, what this means is that the framework should probably undershoot its feature set.

This might sound counter-intuitive. If we are aiming for high adoption, should we not try to cover all the possible use-cases? Shouldn’t we try to solve as many problems as possible, to make sure people find some use in our work?

The problems with trying to solve too many problems at once are plenty. First of all, as modern software development methodologies have discovered, the problem discovery is really a continuous process. Instead of trying to predict what the problems would be and trying to solve them, we should try to deliver value as soon as possible, and then iterate further.

The more subtle problem with a large feature-set is that in my experience, especially more tenured teams see it as more of a liability than leverage. They realize a big investment, especially in a new project will likely result in more work down the line.

A small word of caution here. Especially in the front-end world, this advice to keep the feature set small is taken to an unfortunate extreme. No project should need a library to add left padding to a bunch of strings. The line between a small project that does one thing and does it really well and a comically tiny project is a fine one. A good rule of thumb is to make sure the project should provide some immediate value, and be meaningful by itself. That is, one should be able to do something “production” level with your project and only that.

Take a look at first version of Rails, which is essentially a bunch of ActiveRecord classes that uses Ruby’s dynamism to build an Object Relational Mapper (ORM). All the other features that most Rails developers take for granted came many years later. Similarly, React (in addition to being extracted from an internal Facebook project), barely had many of the features it has now; support for many of the common HTML tags, ES6 classes came later.

Evangelize Constantly

And lastly, but maybe most importantly, teams should actively evangelize their projects to be adopted within a company. This might be initially uncomfortable. Many technical teams have a negative opinion of any sort of marketing. They believe that other teams should be able to evaluate their work on its merits, and everything else is either throwaway or disingenuous.

This is a short-sighted way of looking at it. Developers of shared tools should consider evangelism as not only adverting but also forming a two-way communication channel with their customers.

Take marketing. Many of your potential customers inside your company might have heard of your project, but unless they know the project is well supported and actively maintained, they will probably not consider using it. When you market your project via emails, presentations and such, you are not only letting people know of your project, but sending an active signal that it’s active, maintained project. Many times, just having a face attached to the project that is known inside the company is the difference between real adoption and leverage as opposed to a repository full of insights bit-rotting away.

Moreover, evangelism is also about forming that feedback loop with your customers. When you actively work with your prospective customers, you are getting immediate feedback about the pain points they are having. You see what some of the under-invested parts of your project might have low-hanging fruits for future wins.

Again, a bit of warning here is in order. Evangelism doesn’t come naturally to most developer teams. Moreover, with evangelism sometimes comes sacrifices. It is not unheard of to make one or two small one-off work for a big internal customer, to get some initial adoption. This might feel impure, but sometimes might be necessary. The key here is to keep the scope of the one-off demands as small as possible, and really do it for customers who would be game-changers.

Building shared libraries or frameworks is extremely fulfilling; seeing your code be adopted by others, making their lives easier is why many people get into software development in the first place. And it is an amazing way to create high leverage work in a technical organization. Ability to positively impact the work of tens, hundreds, or even thousands of fellow developers is something most executives would be excited about.

I believe with these guidelines in mind, you would be in a much better place to both deliver value for your company, and have some fun doing it.

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