It can be entertaining to stretch a metaphor into weird shapes… let’s do enterprise software development as Avatar: The Last Airbender.
If you haven’t watched the show you should! Sure it’s for kids, but so is almost everything else made by Hollywood in the last few decades. It’s a well-made story with plenty of character growth, and incidentally an intro to the four classical elements. Which are way less gross than the four temperamental humors, so let’s be thankful the show’s authors didn’t go there.
Now let’s bend the heck out of that conceit and apply it to some roles in developing enterprise software.
Air
“Sales is the company’s air supply” — if you’re not making sales, you might as well not be breathing. No money, no company. Realize this is true for non-profit foundations and pre-customer startups too, and work life will make more sense. Therefore, sales people are air nomads… and again, the linkage works.
I’m going to stick marketing in here too. Marketing is like a turbo pump on the sales inflow. A good marketing group increases the amount and quality of pipeline, and can even help identify new pipelines. Bad marketing chokes off your air supply. An air bender sales person makes magical deals happen by using their powers: “understand the customer’s problems” and “present your solutions to those problems”.
Water
Field engineering… Support cools the overexcited and heals the injured. You’re not going to last long in B2B if you keep churning customers. That means no or poor references, no renewal or expansion revenue, and pretty good odds that you’re churning employees too because they’re always between a rock and a hard place. Support people are the healing water benders. They feel your pain and fix your pain and help you avoid future pain. And then sales and service engineering, building solutions and welding knives of ice… versatility over permanence.
Earth
Engineering makes it go, building features and defenses. But piled earth and balanced stone are not immortal resources; the engineering work is never completed. Engineer earth benders must continually revise, maintain, monitor, improve, and repair their works. This is frustrating to people who believe that software is a write-once-sell-forever thing with an exponential rate of return. It’s true that software can have an exponential return, and a more than linear return on investments that are not guaranteed or perfectly hockey-stick shaped. But that return requires ongoing spend.
Fire
Founders and executives can create new things, inspire teams to form, and command through adversity. They can also spiral out of control into megalomania. “Water. Earth. Air. Fire. Long ago, the four nations lived together in harmony … then everything changed when the Fire Nation attacked.”
But let’s presume we’re talking about positive use of fire… a fire bender is directing energy, decreasing entropy, creating harmony. Executive leaders make people believe in a thing that doesn’t exist: a company, a process, a technology. If they can do it, they’ll make it happen.
Avatar
Product is the Avatar, responsible for finding and maintaining balance. Unfortunately, this is also a flawed human. Aang goes AWOL, Kuruk and Yangchen lose their balance, Roku lets his friend Sozin kick off the Fire Nation’s spiral into insanity. Because they are human, the Avatars often try to find an easier way around what needs to be done. Not everyone can be Kyoshi.
It’s also notable that using the Avatar power brings risk of complete system collapse: a PM’s only power is persuasion, and if that castle of bullshit and dreams is pierced before reality has grown around it, everything collapses.
This has been sitting around in my drafts folder for a really long time, probably on account of it’s so dumb. Enjoy something light for the holiday weekend!
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