Say you are part of an engineering team that is executing on a project that happens to be a company wide initiative. It could be a new program, a large migration, new set of tooling adoption, or a complete overhaul of systems, processes and services.
You have internal customers/ users, people who work in the engineering organizations and sometimes beyond- various stakeholders within the company. What are some common best practices that help this endeavor be successful?
I’ve worked on two such initiatives- one in the engineering efficiency/ developer productivity space at Intel and another one in our hugely successful Security Ambassador program currently at Datadog.
As an individual contributor, I’ve spotted a common theme that drives the success for such initiatives. Here are my observations and learnings summarized:
Vision: A clear vision from the engineering leadership, establishing the north star and a solid ‘WHY’ for the initiative is super important. It helps everyone be clear about the mission for the initiative aligning it with the vision.
Influence (with and without authority): Many a times, these initiatives bring in a whole set of new changes. Influencing folks around to buy-in requires building trust, credibility, persuasion, incentivizing, etc.
Roadmap & checkpoints: Laying a clear roadmap, both short-term and long-term, with checkpoints and a buffer to pivot helps everyone understand what to expect and plan for it in advance.
Pilot & phased rollout: A strategic phased rollout starting with a pilot program (with clear goals, scope, timeline and target audience) aids in measuring progress, ironing out communication plan and serves as an excellent sandbox to uncover roadblocks.
Dogfood: This one is critical to truly understand the good, the bad and the ugly of the solutions being built to provide a better customer/ user experience.
Relationship building: Not everyone will be a huge fan of new changes or initiatives. Finding a cohort of allies and advocates for the initiatives within your customer/ user base will contribute immensely to the success and the perception of it.
Delayed gratification: If the scale of work is huge, the pay off may not be immediate. Be comfortable with recognizing and celebrating small wins.
Success metrics: Defining success criteria, breaking down work into OKRs to measure success metrics is essential to gauge progress and impact.
Roles and Responsibilities: This one needs to be defined explicitly to understand who does what and establish strong ownership. Even better if this is written down as part of official docs.
Integrations: An explicit focus on understanding and streamlining integrations is a good way to know if the change introduced by the initiative affects other tools, services, products. This can reduce or eliminate blockers or unexpected surprises. If there’s something legacy then it can cause an avalanche effect. Consider strategies and action plans for handling incidents and postmortems too.
Anti-patterns: A retrospective of any organizational history is crucial to avoid repeating mistakes and anti-patterns.
Communication: This is THE key factor. A good communication strategy focusing on the right messaging, target audiences, distinction between information need to know levels (broadcasting to a subset vs widely) and usage of proper mediums/channels goes a long way.
I figured I better ship this version of my observations and learnings to make way for more learnings.
As a reader, please share your thoughts on the above. What have you seen similar to the above, what have you seen work differently?