Also I liked the point about carving out dedicated time for engineering autonomy. My org has always has set aside a week per quarter to do something similar to “hygiene week”.
💯. As a staff engineer, I've been motivating my teammates to think of OKRs as their minimum commitments, not maximum commitments, i.e. *leave some slack/room* for the customer project issues that come up (we are a ML Platform team, and our customers are data scientists) and for anything else they want to pick up. This approach (vs. filling entire quarter with OKRs) has made me more sane, and ironically, enabled us to be more proactive in addressing opportunities.
Jean, I have been trying for a long time to articulate this philosophy, and you've done it so well here - thank you for writing this. I'll be sharing often.
In my previous experience, I have implemented a similar approach by providing engineers with the freedom to work as they please. 50% of them were happy and showing a positive sign, the other 50% ended up doing nothing, they are using this as a reason to reject ad hoc coordination with another division...
Do you have any suggestions for addressing the issue of the unproductive 50%?
Great post Jean! “Space to do whatever” reminds me of when Dan Pink talked about why autonomy motivates us - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rrkrvAUbU9Y
Also I liked the point about carving out dedicated time for engineering autonomy. My org has always has set aside a week per quarter to do something similar to “hygiene week”.
💯. As a staff engineer, I've been motivating my teammates to think of OKRs as their minimum commitments, not maximum commitments, i.e. *leave some slack/room* for the customer project issues that come up (we are a ML Platform team, and our customers are data scientists) and for anything else they want to pick up. This approach (vs. filling entire quarter with OKRs) has made me more sane, and ironically, enabled us to be more proactive in addressing opportunities.
Jean, I have been trying for a long time to articulate this philosophy, and you've done it so well here - thank you for writing this. I'll be sharing often.
In my previous experience, I have implemented a similar approach by providing engineers with the freedom to work as they please. 50% of them were happy and showing a positive sign, the other 50% ended up doing nothing, they are using this as a reason to reject ad hoc coordination with another division...
Do you have any suggestions for addressing the issue of the unproductive 50%?