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Engineering strategy
#11 – November 16, 2020
this week's favorite
One of the projects from my time at Stripe that I’m proud of was writing our engineering strategy, which I later sanitized into a public version in Magnitudes of exploration. The strategy was an elegant document that carefully reconciled two worldviews that had initially appeared incompatible within the engineering organization. While it was both a conceptually pure and utterly pragmatic document, in the end, it wasn’t particularly useful. It reflected how we described making tradeoffs as opposed to how we genuinely made tradeoffs.
2020 has brought changes and challenges for everyone—including those in leadership roles. Management style and decision-making have taken on new significance during these testing times as staff’s quality of life—as well as company growth—hang in the balance.
The question that all People teams dread. Whether you’re a seasoned VP of People/Talent or People Ops coordinator fresh into the world of startups, a company wide salary benchmarking is not something anyone looks forward to, however it doesn’t have to be this way.
One of the biggest challenges a product manager will face (or an organization for that matter) is trying to elevate thinking and culture from a project level to a product level.
The team topology approach treats humans and technology as a single sociotechnical ecosystem, and thus it takes a team-sized architecture approach (people first) rather than a technology-first approach, e.g., the monolith vs microservices debate.