One of the trickiest, and most common, leadership scenarios is leading without authority, and I’ve written about one of the styles that I’ve found surprisingly effective in those conditions. I call it Model, Document, and Share.| lethain.com
As the organization starts to write more Technical Specifications, you’ll eventually want a forum to discuss the key decisions. At most companies, that meeting is the Tech Spec Review. The Tech Spec Review is a forum to review feedback on new Tech Specs, resolve open points of discussion, and flag new context to be considered before finalizing the design. Secondarily, it’s a valuable forum for keeping the wider organization aware of new and upcoming technology changes.| infraeng.dev
Fork this template on Google Docs Healthy engineering organizations make a lot of technical decisions. Many of those decisions impact multiple teams (Frontend, Backend) and functions (Engineering, Product, Customer Success, Finance). It’s normal to either feel like you’re moving too slow (“too many stakeholders in every decision”) or that your reckless pace creates frequent rework as issues are discovered late (“this problem would have been obvious if you’d just talked to Security...| Infrastructure Engineering
Fork this template on Google Docs Something about the close-knit social chemistry of a small team gives them a shared brain. Of course you know that last week Michelle decided all new frontend work would happen in Typescript. Ambient awareness is less and less effective as an alignment tool as an organization grows, and becomes quite unreliable as an organization grows past ~twenty folks. One tool that folks use to scale alignment around key decisions is the “decision log.”| Infrastructure Engineering