What makes a good organization?

The truth is that it all comes down to good transparency and good communication.

Good organizations have low friction between their engineering and management teams.

Let me tell you why this is important:

If management sees engineering as the team that just has to build what they want…

You’ll find yourself with a high level of friction.

“Build X for me” is a one-way conversation.

Building software is not just about releasing new features.

It’s a balance between what can be done and what can be scaled.

In a healthy organization, everyone is aware of the full context and target the same goals.

You can then assume that everyone has the best intentions at heart.

When your engineering leader comes to you and says,

“I’d love to be able to do this in a month, but it’s going to take two months.”

You can have a good conversation around why and how it affects the company goals.

These goals and incentives must be well aligned on both sides.

People need to trust each other about who knows what best.

A business leader cannot comment on what happens if technical debt runs awry.

An engineering leader must understand that we may not have the perfect codebase…

…but if we don’t move forward, we won’t make our revenue targets for this quarter.