Last week, we discussed what Make It Count means to us, viewing everything as a potential opportunity to do something great. It’s part of the Change Credo, a philosophy that guides us as we work to build a better point of sale for our customers. The credo is made up of five elements: Make It Count, Make Mistakes, Make It Human, Make It Fun, and Make It Together.
This week we are talking about “Make Mistakes.” At Change we don't fear failure; we learn from it and then find ways we can improve.
Mistake is not a dirty word.
Mistakes are a necessary part of learning and growth.
Experiment early and often.
Never dwell on past failures.
Learn from them. Move on.
Finish smarter and stronger than when you started.
At Change, we see failure as an opportunity to grow as developers, and as people. In order for us to create better software, we need to push ourselves to the limit of what we can do. This comes with risk, but the rewards are so much sweeter. Because we are often experimenting and exploring terrain we’ve never been to, things can go wrong. We’ve made many mistakes, but have learned so much from them.
When we first designed the system for managing tills within Change, our initial solutions failed miserably. We didn’t account for more than one use case, so we had to fix what we had originally created. Unfortunately, the second version was even worse than the first.
Instead of continuing to polish a broken design, we took a step back, begrudgingly threw out our original designs, and started again completely from scratch. The result, a system we’re really proud of and still happy with over a year later.
For Jerod Mollenhauer, our account manager, he believes making mistakes is an essential part of building Change.
“When you make mistakes, you learn and grow. You have to fail a lot to get good at anything. Making mistakes means not being afraid to fail and knowing there’s a support system there for you.”
You can read our entire credo on the Change About page. To learn more about why we created the Change Credo, read our first post in this series. Stay tuned next week, as we explore and discuss another element of our credo: "Make It Human."