By The Readers Issue # 105 - Challenges of Building in BigTech
S01E05 - Yes, the massive cash reserves, world wide HQs, free food, all the perks are great but building in big tech is not as easy as one might imagine.
Howdy Tribe -
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This is the last essay for this season.
(Dec 1) Lessons On Stakeholder Management For Large Cross-Functional Projects
(Dec 8) Psychology of Project Management: Leading Without Authority
Welcome to Building Romes Newsletter - By The Readers Issue, Season no. 1 Essay 5 🎉
Essay
I thought I keep this last essay short, to the point, for this 1st season of Building Romes Newsletter - By The Readers Issue, where I wrote on topics suggested by you, the readers.
Those big campuses (ah the Pre-COVID world), free lunches, massive workforce, big ideas, ambitions, everything about big tech seems wonderful. Mix in the 20% Personal Project time from Google, Week of Code from Apple, it sounds like a place with limitless possibilities; yet the picture from the inside is a little more … real.
Here is list of some of the “things”, that aren’t apparent from the outside, I have seen when building things inside Big Tech from a Program Managers point of view:
Individual Empowerment and Autonomy are sometimes just buzzwords. We call it “alignment” and “LT input” so it doesn’t feel bad but that process change you think will make a difference, or that decision you just made to move that particular milestone, you will come across individuals in leadership who will not look as enthusiastically upon that initiative as you might imagine.
Macro Process Changes Are Hard. You can come up with a great process or workflow but some team or person will find some issue with it; instead of providing feedback they will completely ignore it to do it their own way. It happens.
There are two types of leaders: those who always ask for more headcount & those that always try to push more work on limited headcount. Guess who is more successful.
Everybody hates meetings and makes fun of Program Managers for having meetings but seriously, it is the only way to keep so many moving pieces aligned because everyone has a filter for those status update emails or mutes the slack channels then misses that important update to claim later that they weren’t in the loop.
The hardest people to work with are the Product Managers. The best people to work with are the Product Managers. You know the bad PM when you see one: territorial, treat Program Managers as accountants and schedulers, “It’s a product decision” is a code speak for “You aren’t a PM, so move along”, are prone to power trips (mini-CEO). Great Product Managers are, well, its like suddenly you have this person who is the complete mirror of you, symbiotic friend, like another mind that is focused on the next and helping you setup successfully so you can focus on the now. Its seriously magical when you have Great PM, I cannot put into words the feeling of working with that person everyday on difficult complex problems - sublime.
Leadership moves at waterfall speed but expects frontline teams to think agile. Program Managers and Product Managers spend much of their time trying to squeeze quarters into weeks.
Good Engineers self organize and come up with a solution. Great Engineers write those solutions down - always. Great is a rarity. I worked with an Engineering Manager at Apple who without fail wrote his own meeting minutes in every meeting even when someone was taking notes; he always made sure to share them with the note taker.
Everyone one wants a Gantt chart but no one actually uses it. It’s busy work sometimes and I absolutely do not do Gantt charts.
Decision making is really slow especially from middle to senior levels.
Everyone wants less meetings, but more information, also make all the information fit in one to two sentences because no one wants to read details. Seriously.
As orgs grow, communication breaks down. Turns out, humans are really bad at talking to each other. If you ever wonder why Product Managers and Project Managers are so busy all the time in meetings, well, this is why.
No tells the truth; everyone has a narrative. Telling the raw truth is not a feature but a bug - status updates, risk items, project delays. The really great leaders bring truth, raw truth, to the table.
Under promise and over deliver is bad. Over promise and under deliver is bad. Just the right amount of promise and delivery on time, leadership doesn’t have patience for that.
You must always seem like you have a plan. Even a plan for a plan is great but you have to have a plan because then we can change that risk status from red to yellow. Lord give me strength.
Leaders who rise up during a crisis are rewarded and celebrated. Those who run tight ships and don’t make too much noise are often missed. Nobody really stops and asks why do those crisis keep popping up. Eventually, you notice a dark pattern where some leaders let things get worse, even though they knew it would, before swooping in to save the day.
Leadership isn’t interested in that technical debt until it becomes catastrophic to their plans. Until you reach such a point, keep passing that continuing resolution and borrow borrow borrow so we can build that oooo shiny new feature on top of a rickety infrastructure held together by duct tape and paper clips because refactoring is hard.
I know it seems all bat shit crazy but honestly, these challenges are what forge our skill sets, teach us to scale over impossible complexities and make followers into leaders and truly make these places fun to work at. Weird right.
Until next time! 👋 Happy New Year! Happy Holidays! Stay safe! Stay happy!
-Aadil
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