Once you become an engineering executive, an invisible timer starts ticking in the background. Tick tick tick. At some point that timer will go off, at which point someone will rush up to you demanding an engineering strategy. It won’t be clear what they mean, but they will want it, really, really badly. If we just had an engineering strategy, their eyes will implore you, things would be okay. For a long time, those imploring eyes haunted me, because I simply didn’t know what to give them...| lethain.com
This is a work-in-progress draft! Even the very best policies fail if they aren’t adopted by the teams they’re intended to serve. In my experience, it’s common for a thoughtful strategy to be ruined by a terrible rollout strategy. Can we persistently change our company’s behaviors with a one-time announcement? No, probably not. The good news is that effectively operating a policy doesn’t have to be magic. There are common patterns that take time and attention, but I’ve seen them w...| lethain.com
About a year ago I started sending public weekly updates to a relevant public (within the company) mailing list. I’ve found the practice useful enough to write a few works on the how and why. This practice is sometimes called a 5-15 report reflecting the goal of spending fifteen minutes a week writing a report that can be read in five minutes.| lethain.com
Current thoughts plus a collection of resources on the subject of documentation, and how to use it effectively.| Aaron Bruce | aaronbruce.com