Serverless Craic Ep27 Challenge Tech Strategy - Phase 2 of Flywheel

Serverless Craic from The Serverless Edge

It's important that engineers challenge tech strategy. Challenge is about the environment. When you decide on a strategy, do you have the right environment to challenge it?
In the last episode, we talked about Phase 1 of The Value Flywheel Effect: Clarity of Purpose and setting direction. The Value Flywheel Effect is our book which is available for preorder.
Part of bringing people along with you, is creating an environment where they can question purpose and challenge direction. But also, it's doing it in a safe and constructive fashion. You don't have your architecture leaders setting the direction and imposing it. You need to do it together. And you need to do things in a collaborative and facilitated to invite challenge.

Techniques we use like Wardley Mapping, Event Storming and Threat Modelling are done as a team and collaboratively. People have an opportunity to challenge the process and artefacts. They're not challenging the individuals. That's very important. Because you need to have a good feedback loop. To understand if it can be better. Or if this could be improved. In high performance organisations in the cloud, things move very fast. You can't know at all.

Challenge is about engineers. Our greatest engineers know the nuts and bolts and the nooks and crannies of the system. If you silence their voice, you're going to lose a huge amount of value. If you create a good environment, your engineers can point out where things won't work. Or bring new ideas to the table. You get richer system. So design your organisation and your tech around the ability to challenge. It's absolutely critical.

Architects and senior leadership teams are there to enable and empower teams to deliver the best outcomes they can. It's about flipping the hierarchy. The team is at the top of the pyramid. And from a hierarchical point of view, we're there to enable and support. If you hire smart engineers, your best technical strategy is to get out of their way. Make sure they know what the goal is, and get out of their way. You have got to put in the right support systems to make sure people can work effectively.
You need enabling constraints as well. To guide engineers along the path. You need to enable teams to grow really fast, but you want to do it in a secure and well architected way. So that you're not going fast and creating lots of technical debt. Part of an environment for success is making sure guardrails are in place to enable engineers go fast responsibly.

The last thing is pathway to production. By making sure you have a rapid feedback loop into the hands of real users you're part of an environment for success. Because you are removing impediments to the flow of value to end users. You have a well oiled pathway to production.
What happens if you don't have a good environment for challenge. You'll start to see people disengage. They'll feel that they are not listened to. And they will leave eventually.

Team interaction modes will be suboptimal. Lots of teams will do the same things. There will be repeat work because there's no way to challenge. You'll see teams competing with each other. Instead of enabling and empowering each other. There are two systems. The system of all the employees in the company. And then the system or the technology we're working on. You have to bring those two together and look at them thr

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