2min chapter

Developing Leadership cover image

Placing Bets & Building Trust as an Engineering Leader

Developing Leadership

CHAPTER

When Do You Pull Out of the Norms and Structure of the Organization?

When do you, when do you pull out of all of the norms and structure of the organization? And not just when the CEO gets a crazy idea. I'm curious, Jason, like there's for sure engineering leaders listening to this right now who are going, I want to do that with X. But what should be some of the criteria that we're applying to when we really should say, okay, we're breaking all the rules?"

00:00
Speaker 2
So it's interesting, right? When do you, when do you pull out of all of the norms and structure of the organization? And
Speaker 1
not just when the CEO gets a crazy idea. I'm curious, Jason, like there's for
Speaker 2
sure engineering leaders listening to this right now who are going, I want to do that with X. But what should
Speaker 1
be some of the criteria that we're applying to when we really should say, okay, we're breaking all the rules and we're
Speaker 2
we're going to put it somewhere else. We're going to make it a skunk work project or office of the CTO. Yeah,
Speaker 1
I think there's a couple of very simple ones. One is when there is a singular person who's competently capable of running it, at least a singular person, maybe, you know, two in the GitHub actions case, as an example. But like, you need somebody who's like, not the CTO, or if it's a CEO's hair, brain, dead, not the CEO, you need somebody who's in the organization who can go and do that. And this is going back to a bunch of other analogies that we use, but like, you know, a different leader that can go do that. That's one. And the other is, I think you have to have time bounds, you have to understand like what would success look like, all that sort of stuff. Because, you know, one of the things that you might notice in some of the other large organizations that are quote unquote innovating, like on AI as an example, now is like, they're taking multi-year approaches to some of these things. And obviously that is there's some benefit to long research in some domains, but there shouldn't be multiple years to show some sort of value prop, some obvious value prop. I do believe too, that organizations tend to need to be a little bit more mature to handle these structures because people will get bruised ego, particularly leaders. So let's say you've had a product or an engineering leader and you're moving this outside to somebody else, outside their domain. So it doesn't report into that chain. That is going to be a difficult conversation because there are going to be a bunch of bruised egos. The other flip side of this is a say, it's staying inside of one of those two, the product or the engineering leader, if you have two people who are doing this, one of the other ones is going to be upset. And then if it's staying inside, let's say, staying inside the engineering leader, specifically where this would probably stay, is then all of a sudden the P's get upset because they think they should be the one who are quote unquote doing this. And this is where really where I think a lot of these things fall down is going, like in a previous episode, we talked about psychologists and sociologists and stuff like, we do too much appeasement of these things. And we have to make sure that we understand what we're trying to achieve here. And that's how these things fail in my opinion.

Get the Snipd
podcast app

Unlock the knowledge in podcasts with the podcast player of the future.
App store bannerPlay store banner

AI-powered
podcast player

Listen to all your favourite podcasts with AI-powered features

AI-powered
podcast player

Listen to all your favourite podcasts with AI-powered features

Discover
highlights

Listen to the best highlights from the podcasts you love and dive into the full episode

Discover
highlights

Listen to the best highlights from the podcasts you love and dive into the full episode

Save any
moment

Hear something you like? Tap your headphones to save it with AI-generated key takeaways

Save any
moment

Hear something you like? Tap your headphones to save it with AI-generated key takeaways

Share
& Export

Send highlights to Twitter, WhatsApp or export them to Notion, Readwise & more

Share
& Export

Send highlights to Twitter, WhatsApp or export them to Notion, Readwise & more

AI-powered
podcast player

Listen to all your favourite podcasts with AI-powered features

AI-powered
podcast player

Listen to all your favourite podcasts with AI-powered features

Discover
highlights

Listen to the best highlights from the podcasts you love and dive into the full episode

Discover
highlights

Listen to the best highlights from the podcasts you love and dive into the full episode