Flow + Joy: Why People-Service-Profit Still Wins in Software

I am guilty. I still bleed purple and orange from my time as Hub Operations Manager at FedEx Express. They taught me a lot and essentially molded me into the leader and logistics-minded individual I am today. That also influences my background in project management. But this post isn’t about that. It’s about why I do what I do in my line of business and have continued doing so since 2004 when I made the switch to technology. 

When Frederick W. Smith launched FedEx in the 1970s, he made an unusual promise: “People–Service–Profit.” Take care of employees first; they’ll deliver outstanding service, and profit will follow. Fifty years later, we see the same pattern in technology: high-trust teams build resilient flow systems, those systems delight customers, and the business grows. 

At Big Agile, we’re unapologetic disciples of that chain reaction (even if we practice it indirectly). Everything we discussed in Q2, Story-Point Physics, Flow Radar Basics, DORA Narratives, Multi-Team AI, and AI-Assisted Retros, was aimed at one outcome: helping people do their best work every sprint. Perhaps a better way to think of that is that I hope to serve at least as a catalyst for change in the right direction. The rest follows as a bonus (or like we say in the South, gravy). 

People → Flow

Developers are knowledge athletes. When cognitive load increases (setting up environments, battling flaky tests, and guessing the next dependency, no sprint velocity charts), it can disguise the drag. That’s why this week we shift from flow metrics to Developer Experience (DevEx) metrics: 

• Review the wait time
• Build a stability index
• Onboarding friction
• Sentiment pulse from Slack

These metrics highlight the human roadblocks your Kanban board can’t detect very well. Address them, and your engineers will regain focus, the essential ingredient for innovation.

Flow → Service

Once people are unblocked, service quality jumps: lead times shrink, deployment frequency stabilizes, and incident MTTR plummets. Customers feel the change long before they read a press release:

• Features arrive predictably.
• Bugs remain fixed.
• Support tickets feature more "thank yous" than complaints.

That’s service excellence, measured in customer sighs of relief as much as NPS scores. Flow without service is theater. Flow plus service is a competitive advantage; a necessity in today's hyper-competitive markets.

Service → Profit

Executives don’t "fund" dashboards; they fund outcomes. When DevEx improvements slice lead time by 20% and reduce turnover by a headcount or two, the CFO notices, believe me. If you can get any CFO on your side by the way, you can accomplish most things. Freed capacity reflects itself in roadmap "pull-ahead" dates. Recruiting expenses decrease. Churn falls because users receive fixes before frustration sets in. Profit is the scoreboard, not the strategy.

What's Coming Up This Week

Each post will include practical code snippets, AI prompts, and facilitation tactics so you can act tomorrow, not someday (RSS Feed for Readers).
 

Your Big Agile Challenge

I need your help to gather "the data". See if you can follow along this path and if you can see some kind of movement in your teams during this week. I would love to hear the challenges etc...if they work (or even if they don't). Send me a note anytime.

1. Pick one DevEx metric your team secretly dislikes.
2. Instrument it with a five-line script (we’ll provide).
3. Bring the chart to the retrospective. Ask, “How might we move this by 10%?”
4. Run the experiment for a sprint.
5. Post the before/after screenshot and tag #Flow+Joy. We’ll share wins and lessons learned.

Why We Care

Big Agile exists because teams deserve more than bumper-sticker agility. They deserve the clarity that data provides and the humanity that true facilitation unlocks. They deserve a culture that embraces the hard truth of the work we do in product development. When people thrive, service shines; when service shines, profit follows. Smith knew it at FedEx. Why can’t we live it in software?

Let’s finish Q2 the way we started: data in one hand, empathy in the other, and customers cheering at the finish line. Ready? 

Tomorrow, we balance DORA speed with DevEx health. 

See you then!

Recap Links

Intro: Why People-Service-Profit Still Wins in Software
SUN: DevEx vs DORA and Why Both Matter
MON: DevEx vs. DORA-Platform Engineering & Flow
TUE: DevEx vs. DORA-Value Stream Management
WED: DevEx vs. Psychological Safety and Metrics
THU: DevEx Experience Library
FRI: DevOps and MLOps - The Next Frontier
SAT: DevEx ROI-Engineering Impact