Q: How do you build consensus in engineering teams with such a diverse set of opinions and approaches? What is consensus? Is it one side winning over the other? Is it arriving at a compromise? More importantly, does it matter how we arrived at the consensus?
This is great, thanks for sharing, I really enjoy reading your stuff. I would love to hear more about *team decision making* culture, approaches and styles from your experiences in Apple, Google and Nike! I feel that this is a recurring headache in most big orgs
Totally agree on the main points of psychologically safe culture/documentation/accountability to have a repeatable process to address different engineering issues. What about building consensus for some high level strategic decisions? One example I have is for a program I'm managing on application modernization. Two stakeholders preferred one approach A, the other four preferred another one B. I summarized the pros and cons for both approaches and presented to the CTO, but CTO sided with A. Apparently the two stakeholders for A don't have significant API engineering experience. The result is that the other stakeholders would stay low to do minimum to get by, and I know A would delay and not provide much value to get the whole organizations to modernize their applications. Any suggestions I can handle this situation better?
This is great, thanks for sharing, I really enjoy reading your stuff. I would love to hear more about *team decision making* culture, approaches and styles from your experiences in Apple, Google and Nike! I feel that this is a recurring headache in most big orgs
Totally agree on the main points of psychologically safe culture/documentation/accountability to have a repeatable process to address different engineering issues. What about building consensus for some high level strategic decisions? One example I have is for a program I'm managing on application modernization. Two stakeholders preferred one approach A, the other four preferred another one B. I summarized the pros and cons for both approaches and presented to the CTO, but CTO sided with A. Apparently the two stakeholders for A don't have significant API engineering experience. The result is that the other stakeholders would stay low to do minimum to get by, and I know A would delay and not provide much value to get the whole organizations to modernize their applications. Any suggestions I can handle this situation better?