💵 During a financial literacy course, I heard an interesting idea. Each of us has a “minimum acceptable standard” of our financial state. This is the level we are willing to “tolerate” and not go below. We are usually somewhere around this minimum point, which also changes over time.

⛴️ In the work of every team in every activity, you can track some baseline (or waterline), a standard that is adhered to. For example, mandatory 100% test coverage. Or, not being late for meetings. Or, mandatory documentation. Or, technical design before implementation.

🥛 This is the culture you support and develop. Sometimes, it even became easier for me to distinguish it as “above the baseline” or “below the baseline.” That is, if someone does not write tests, it is below our established standard. A kind of conversion to a boolean.

💪 Someone in the team is constantly trying to raise this standard level: strengthening typing, proposing additional processes to improve quality, advocating for 100% test coverage and a zero-error policy. Someone just follows the “rules,” the average level, accepts changes but does not often propose their own.

🏖️ But there are also those who will constantly try to lower this quality level as much as possible. After all, deterioration can always be justified: there was not enough time for tests, there was no clear task for the zero-error policy.

So one of my tasks as a team lead, I defined as being a quality keeper, ensuring that our development baseline does not drop, but rather rises. As the codebase grows, complexity increases, so to “stay in place, you have to run with all your might.”

🏦 The same goes for finances: dreaming big (becoming a millionaire, buying a Porsche) is very important. But also try to raise your minimum acceptable level a little higher. And here you can find the next steps to take to go higher.