As a senior technical leader, it’s often viewed as a temping trap to get down into nitty-gritty details of software engineering or product development. As a CTO, Head of Engineering or equivalent, we’re supposed to play at the strategic level and leave the details to our engineering leads, aren’t we?
Well… yes. And no. Sometimes, creating a strategy and leaving it for our teams to figure out ignores the fact that our organisation constrains our teams in ways that we don’t expect. Sometimes it’s actually necessary to venture down into the weeds and see what the teams are doing - and what we’re doing that actively harms their efforts despite our intentions to the contrary.
In this talk we’ll look at some ways to map strategy to execution by setting “unreasonable” goals - and then working out how to get organisational constraints - and ourselves - out of the way.
Here’s a version of this talk I delivered at the YOW! CTO Summit 2018:
My name is Andrew Harcourt.
I do Head of Technology/Engineering, Consultant CTO and other similarly-shaped work with companies large and small. I specialise in project rescue, governance and development methodologies.
I'm a Principal Consultant at ThoughtWorks, a co-founder at Stack Mechanics, one of the organisers of the DDD Brisbane conference and, in my spare time (ha!), I also run my own photography business, Ivory Digital.
My main areas of interest are domain-driven design, event sourcing, massively-scalable service architectures and large-scale, high-load, geographically-distributed systems.
I'm a regular speaker and presenter at conferences and training events. My mother wrote COBOL on punch cards and I've been coding in one form or another since I was five years old.
I have a number of open-source creations, including Nimbus, ConfigInjector and NotDeadYet, and am an occasional contributor to several more.
Cyclist. Photographer. Ballroom dancer. Motorcyclist. Occasional sailor. Lapsed fencer.