I’ve had the opportunity to build and lead tech organizations across companies of various sizes and stages. If you want to discuss leadership, I can try to help.
I was interviewed by Heroku/Salesforce on engineering leadership where I talked about 4 principles I have come to rely on.
Full interview and transcript here: https://www.heroku.com/podcasts/codeish/principles-of-pragmatic-engineering
Pragmatic engineering is when the tech you build has an oversized impact on the business. It’s about applying the right technology solution at the right time at the right cost. It’s about prioritizing practical concerns.
If you are a software engineering leader, you work within tight constraints and competition. The following principles will save you time, money, energy, and increase the probability of your organization’s success. They are in descending order of importance. Find balance among them, and apply common sense.
The Four Fs:
Fast > Function > Form > Fabrication
1. Be fast
The #1 thing that will move the needle for most teams is a culture of speed. It spurs ownership, decisiveness, and creativity.
a. Get your work out quickly. Think fast. Be decisive and have a bias for action.
b. Get me to what I want as fast as possible. Customer’s experience should be faster than anyone else, including checkout and customer service.
c. Websites and Apps should be high-performance.
d. UX should feel fast, and get out of the way.
2. Build impactful features
a. Build what truly matters. And nothing else.
b. Verbosity kills engagement. Balance text with imagery, when communicating with the customer, and for internal communication.
3. Be pleasant to use
a. Make it beautiful, but not unnecessarily. Never at the expense of the above two.
b. Less is more. Reduce cognitive load, reduce verbiage.
4. Be beautiful inside.
a. The process matters. Get rid of systems which hold you back.
b. Write good, clean code. PRs should be descriptive, respecting the reviewer’s time. Smaller PRs are quicker to review, test and push to prod.
c. Quick hacks are totally fine, but they should still have some elegance to them. Include a story in the backlog with reasoning and steps to get to a better longer-term solution.
d. Keep infra costs in mind.
e. Improve tooling for everyone.
This is the TLDR version of a longer post at https://medium.com/@karanmg/the-4-principles-of-pragmatic-engineering-c41eb6ef389f
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