Oh shit.https://mastodon.social/@yvonnezlam/113199649409710636
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In my experience as a manager and leader, I spend a lot of time trying to get engineers to care more about business outcomes than technical issues. Not because I think the technical issues don't matter. But because I know if that if you're not trying to understand business outcomes, your judgment about the technical issues is going to be much worse.
Many engineers fundamentally do not believe this to be true. And it's one of the things that sets them at odds with leadership.
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@Ashedryden I think I know what you're asking, but I'm not 100% sure. Would you mind unpacking a little?
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@polotek sales is often physically separated from engineering and there’s little crossover with the two orgs other than when sales is asking something from eng. Would incorporating eng and sales more cause better understanding?
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@polotek
"Many engineers do not believe that to be true".Yes. Why should they, to make your job easier?
If they cared more about "business outcomes" than "technical issues", they would not be "engineers" any longer, would they?
It could only result in inferior products.
Please look to BOEING as a prime example of your philosophy in action. Not enough? HP then?
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@joea it doesn't sound like you understood what I said. That's fine. Most people don't.
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mnl mnl mnl mnl mnlreplied to Marco Rogers last edited by
@polotek One thing that I enjoy working with the business side is that it makes technical decisions much more effective, because you know the problem you are solving.
If you understand that a whole process X is not necessary or you know that you can do Y with a small tweak to the current backend, you save yourself the hassle of building a whole half assed internal app that does literally nothing but frustrate everyone, put additional load on the DB and churn out support tickets for the devs.
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Marco Rogersreplied to mnl mnl mnl mnl mnl last edited by
@mnl it's a great skill to develop. Many people find it onerous to pull out these real needs. And it can be. Because people who don't understand software development rarely know how to express their needs in a way that's helpful to us. But when you get it right, it's pretty magical.
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@polotek I think I am fully on board with what I think you're saying in this thread, but I would like to ask some follow up questions to specifically unpack understanding business outcomes a bit more. May I ask you more specific follow up questions on that?
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@polotek Isn’t most technology applied professionally to achieve certain business outcomes?
My experience is that technology serves business, and it’s the up the engineers to prevent either this very business or bad tech decisions from getting in the way of quickly delivering towards these outcomes.
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Jenniferplusplusreplied to Ashe Dryden last edited by
@Ashedryden @polotek
It sounds like you mean, is the problem exacerbated by the communication distance between sales and engineers in the same company?I hadn't thought about it, but my guess is it probably doesn't make much difference.
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Jenniferplusplusreplied to Jenniferplusplus last edited by
@Ashedryden @polotek
OTOH, my initial reaction to the question was if the problem is exacerbated by the communication distance between engineers and people making purchase decisions at the customer company.In which case, probably somewhat.
I think that the separation exists is not a problem in itself. But engineers often feel very disempowered in their companies, and that (perceived or actual) disempowerment will impact the kind of assessment they can give.
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@polotek I feel like this is also just designing for your user. Like I do research but at the end of the day I want my systems to make the lives of product group engineers easier.
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@polotek I've started using https://wpostats.com/ to back stuff up after Alex linked me to it and it's so helpful
As an engineer, it's genuinely hard for me to be able to tell a story about how technical improvements concretely translate to moneydollars. I think beyond developers who don't believe in business outcomes being the top priority, those of us who do think that matters are severely lacking in tools to measure and communicate and map our technical decisions to business outcomes in the first place.
so it just ends up being easier to argue about developer experience and technical details. that's what we know. that's what we can "measure", at least in our heads and talking among each other. I just want more tools available to bridge that gap
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@angermcs @polotek I honestly think that there's a lot of stuff that can be measured, and we just think it can't, or don't have the tools yet to do so, so we give up and think too highly of ourselves, and start thinking our arbitrary technical decisions are The Enlightened Way.
I don't think most managers etc are this ignorant. I think they genuinely do have much more of an understanding of how to connect the dots than engineers give them credit for.
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@zkat @polotek Sure, but theres also the tradeoff. If its going to take me 5x longer to build the measurement pipeline to "justify", would just building it not be better for the business? And there are things like developer productivity, where people have dedicated their entire careers to "measuring" it and the answer is you basically can't measure it reliably. You end up having to rely on CSAT numbers to best approximate it.
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@polotek it's also important though that the business people understand the technology behind the business. Too often this requirement of understanding is only one way and it leads to massive tech debt, inefficiencies, lost productivity, and eventually employee retention. Both groups of people need to understand where the other is coming from so that they can better communicate and have empathy for each other. Of course that's also general life advice not just in the corporate context.
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@touge I think there should be effective communication. But I don't think the burden of understanding goes both ways. It would be great if we could ask everyone to understand technology more in depth. And people can certainly do a bit better than what we usually see. But technology is a high value field precisely because it's a specialized skillset that is difficult to replicate.