Remove Dependencies

Create a culture that favors begging forgiveness (and reversing decisions quickly) rather than asking permission. Invest in infrastructure such as progressive / cancellable rollouts. Use asynchronous written docs to get people aligned (“comment in this doc by Friday if you disagree with the plan”) rather than meetings (“we’ll get approval at the next weekly review meeting”).

Demand Clear Narratives

Unclear thinking is a reliable cause of slowness, and gets revealed under a microscope.

Bonus points for documenting plans in writing. One of the largest advantages of a strong writing culture is that it forces much clearer narratives than meetings, powerpoint, or five Slack threads spread over 8 business days.

Get Your Deployment and Incident Metrics In Shape

No matter what your job function is, part of your role is ensuring that your engineering team has enough time to get their vital metrics in order. Especially if you’re a product leader, it’s essential that you resist the temptation to push relentlessly for more features and give your engineering counterparts the room to get fit.

Find Trusted Engineering Guides

...it’s especially important to build a strong relationship with all of your engineering partners, and especially these trusted guides.