GoKawiilAlexander Belanger Co-Founder Hatchet
One of the most important engineering decisions we made this year was sending the following emoji in our company Slack channel.
If you’d told me that 2 years ago, I probably would’ve quit on the spot; assuming, naturally, that the shitcoiners trying to infiltrate our Discord community had done so successfully and I was an NFT shill.
But this is not that. The green toad is called Bufo, and the yellow rope-looking thing is an andon cord. Stay with me.
It’s an actual, physical rope, originally used in Japan’s manufacturing industry, most notably Toyota factories, and popularized in Western culture through Mike Rother’s Toyota Kata. In the event of a defect, bottleneck, or other known issue in a factory, an employee would pull the andon cord and all factory production would stop.
Please excuse the AI-generated image. I couldn't find a fair-use picture of an andon cord on the internet.
There’s no point in continuing production if a bottleneck exists in the assembly line, because the productivity losses caused by the bottleneck (backpressure on upstream components, underutilization of downstream components) would exceed those caused by fully stopping production to fix the issue.
Productivity gains aside, pulling the andon cord was a celebrated cultural norm. The worker who pulled it was thanked and praised, creating a culture of continuous improvement and discouraging the normalization of production issues.
In Hatchet’s early days, we spoke often of the kind of culture we’d like to build. One of our founding team members mentioned the andon cord as a cultural norm they’d appreciated in a previous job. It immediately resonated with us, despite the reflex opposing anything you might read at Wharton.
Putting my best managerialist hat on: every software startup is a factory. The raw materials are computers, human brains, and your other tooling. The output is software delivered to end users.
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