1) Write down Principles 📋
Many of the themes we have discussed so far can be encoded as principles.
Principles provide a blueprint for how decisions should be made. They are, simultaneously:
- 👌 A definition of what good looks like.
- 🗣️ A shared language to be used in daily work.
Counterintuitively, in order to be useful, principles should be specific. Simple propositions like "we write high quality software" or "we care about customers", are not going to cut it. They are not going to be useful in real life.
To tell whether a principle is good, ask yourself: how am I able to tell if we are not following it? If you don't have a good answer, chances are the principle is not clear enough.
Examples:
If you want / need to create principles from scratch, involve your team in doing so. If you are in a leadership position, this is what a simple process might look like:
- ⬇️ Provide high-level guidance — provide your team a few strategic themes you would like to highlight in principles. You might say, for example, you want to define engineering principles that incorporate best practices the team believes in (you can let them propose a few to begin with), and also describe the communication dynamics the team wants to encourage.
- ⬆️ Get proposals from your team — let people in your team come up with their best proposals, including a description of why these make for good candidates, and how they would use them in practice.
- 🔄 Challenge and iterate — discuss these principles, introduce your own, improve them and eventually wrap-up. As a leader, it should be clear you are responsible for the final outcome, but people should feel invested and aligned with the result.
Engineering Principles ⭐
