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A building code inspector will tell you that a firestop is a beautiful thing because it sits inside a wall and waits for a disaster and then it holds the heat back long enough for people to get out of the house.
Jamie A is an inspector I know and he looks at a firestop with a kind of holy respect because it does its job by staying still and being thick and resisting change. But when you are trying to build a website or a software tool a firestop is a curse and most agencies call that firestop an account manager.
They sell you this person as a gift and they tell you that you will have a single point of contact and you will never have to chase a developer again. They make it sound like a luxury service and they give this person a title like Client Success Lead and they put them in a nice shirt and they give them a very calm voice. This person is there to make you feel heard and they are there to make sure the project feels smooth and they are also there to make sure the developers never have to look at your angry face.
The Tuesday Morning Loop
It is on a Tuesday morning and Ben is on his fourth call in a row with a woman named Sarah. Ben is the client and he is frustrated because the mobile menu on his new site still covers the phone number and he cannot click the button to call his own office.
He told Sarah this last week and he told her the week before and he told her the first time they looked at the staging link together. Sarah is a lovely person and she listens with a lot of focus and she nods and she says she totally hears him. She says that is great feedback and she is going to take it back to the team and she is going to make sure it gets prioritized in the next sprint. She types into a document and she uses a bullet point and she writes down that the client has some notes on the navigation. Ben feels a little better because Sarah was so nice about it and he ends the call thinking that the problem is finally going to go away.
Sarah knows that the developer is already stressed and she knows that the developer has three other projects and she wants to keep the relationship between the agency and the client pleasant. She doesn’t want to tell the developer that Ben is getting angry or that the mobile menu is a mess because that would sound like a failure on her part to manage the client’s expectations.
So she launders the complaint on its way through the wall. She turns a sharp cry for help into a soft suggestion for a design tweak. She puts a ticket into a system and the ticket says “client wants to look at nav spacing” and then she goes to lunch.
Three weeks later the site is still wrong and it is wrong in a slightly different way because the developer saw the ticket and thought it was about the desktop header and he moved a logo two pixels to the left. Ben sees this and he feels like he is shouting into a void and he wonders if he is speaking a different language. He is talking to the one person who cannot fix anything and that is the core of the rot in the agency world.
The Snack and the Solution
The diet I started at today is making me think about all the things we add to our lives that we do not need and we call them improvements. I want a snack and my brain is telling me that a snack would be a service to my body but I know that the snack is just a buffer between me and the reality of being hungry.
An account manager is a snack for a project and they make the hunger for a solution go away for an hour but they do not actually feed the project what it needs. They are a layer of fat and they keep the heat in and they keep the progress out.
Every organization that grows too fast adds this layer because it is easier to hire a talker than it is to build a better process. The layer absorbs the difficulty and it improves the mood of the relationship but it degrades the information inside the relationship. By the time anyone notices that the project is failing the two parties are having entirely different conversations in parallel and they are both wondering why the other person is so confused. Ben thinks the agency is incompetent and Sarah thinks Ben is difficult and the developer thinks he is doing exactly what he was told to do.
A Different Model
This is why the model at
works and it is why a small in-house team in Toronto is better than a giant agency with a floor full of account managers.
When you talk to the person doing the work you are not sending a message through a firestop and you are not waiting for a laundered version of your own thoughts to come back to you. You are talking to the person who can open the file and change the line of code and see the result in real time. There is no document where feedback goes to die and there is no polite summary that removes the urgency.
The price of a website should include the ability to talk to the person building it and if you are paying for a buffer you are just paying to be misunderstood.
When Jamie A looks at a building he looks for the gaps where smoke can move and he wants those gaps closed tight. But a project is not a fire and it is more like a river and you want the water to move fast from the source to the sea. When you put an account manager in the middle of that flow you are creating a dam and you are wondering why the ground is dry on the other side. You are paying for the dam and you are calling it a bridge.
They hide the fact that the timeline is slipping and they hide the fact that the developer didn’t understand the brief and they hide the fact that the client is losing sleep. They keep the peace and they lose the project.
I am sitting here at my desk and I am very hungry and I am looking at a glass of water and I am thinking about how much we lie to ourselves about what is necessary. We think we need the layers and we think we need the protection and we think we need the nice people in the nice shirts to tell us that everything is “great feedback.”
We do not need that. We need the truth and we need it to be loud and we need it to be fast. We need to talk to the person who can fix the mobile menu and we need to tell them that it is broken and we need to hear them say that they understand because they are looking at the same screen as we are.
The Goal is Utility
Ben doesn’t want a friend or a therapist. Ben wants to call his office.
We have turned business into a theater of politeness and we have forgotten that the goal is to make something that works. Ben doesn’t want a friend and he doesn’t want a therapist and he doesn’t want a bullet point in a document that no one will read. Ben wants to call his office from his phone and he wants the button to work and he wants to know that the person on the other end of the line actually knows how to use a keyboard.
If you find yourself in a meeting where everyone is nodding and everyone is being very kind and yet the thing you asked for three weeks ago is still wrong then you are talking to a firestop. You are on the wrong side of the wall and the heat is building up and you are the only one who can feel it.
You can stay in the room and wait for the next agenda template or you can find a team that doesn’t hide behind a layer of success leads. You can find a team that lets you talk to the builders and you can find a team that gives you a price and a date and a name.
The hunger I feel right now is sharp and it is honest and it is telling me exactly what my body wants and there is no one here to tell me that my hunger is “great feedback.” There is just the hunger and there is just the work and that is how a project should feel. It should feel direct and it should feel a little bit uncomfortable because that is where the truth lives.
We have reached a point where we value the mood of the meeting more than the quality of the product and that is a tragedy. We have built entire industries around the idea of keeping people happy while we fail them. We have created roles for people who are experts at apologizing and we have forgotten how to be experts at delivering. We have traded the heat of the work for the cool of the insulation and we are wondering why nothing is moving.
The time-to-resolution disparity between filtered tickets and direct builder interaction.
Jamie A would say that a firestop is there to buy you time and he is right. But in a project time is the one thing you cannot buy back and the longer you spend talking to a buffer the less time you have to build the world you want.
You should stop talking to the person who cannot fix it and you should start talking to the person who can. You should demand the heat and you should demand the truth and you should never let a nice shirt stand between you and the code.
The mobile menu is still broken and the phone number is still hidden and the account manager is still typing into a document. The developer is still working on the wrong thing and the client is still losing money. This is the cost of the firestop and it is a price that is never published on the website. But the price is there and you are paying it every time you say thank you to a person who has no power to help you.
I am going to finish this water and I am going to stay hungry and I am going to remember that the best way to get something done is to talk to the person doing it.
No layers and no buffers and no firestops. Just the work and the person and the truth. That is the only way to build anything that lasts and it is the only way to get out of the building before it burns down.
