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:
Cyclist. Runner. Hiker. Singer. Violinist. Budding skydiver. Photographer. Former semi-pro photographer. Ballroom dancer. Motorcyclist. Occasional sailor. Good with edged weapons. Red Frog. Legatee.
It should go without saying that any opinions, beliefs and other statements made here are my own, and do not represent in any way the views of any employer either past or present. Let's be grown-ups about this, shall we?
I'm Head of IT & Engineering at Etax, Australia's largest privately-held tax agent. Other interesting places I've been before Etax include Octopus Deploy, ThoughtWorks, Readify, Zap BI, Realex Payments and TRL.
I'm a fan of high-quality code, domain-driven design, event-driven architecture, continuous delivery and, most importantly, shipping software 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.