Andrew Harcourt
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Ask for the unreasonable… and then get out of the way

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.

Target audience
CTOs, Heads of Engineering
Approximate duration
60 minutes including questions

Talk video

Here’s a version of this talk I delivered at the YOW! CTO Summit 2018:

Work

I'm at Octopus Deploy, helping to ship software that helps people ship software. Other interesting places I've been before Octopus include ThoughtWorks, Readify, Zap BI, Realex Payments and TRL.

I'm also 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.

I'm a fan of high-quality code, domain-driven design, event-driven architecture, continuous delivery and, most importantly, shipping code that works and that solves people's problems.

I have a number of small open-source creations, including Nimbus, ConfigInjector and NotDeadYet, and am an occasional contributor to several more.

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.

Play

Cyclist. Photographer. Ballroom dancer. Motorcyclist. Occasional sailor. Lapsed fencer.

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