The Manager's Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change

by Camille Fournier

Create Policies When it comes to your team, you want to help them understand what it takes to get to “yes.” Perhaps you are dealing with an engineer who wants to switch to a new programming language for a project, one that your team doesn’t use. He has some great arguments as to why this language is the perfect tool for the job, but you’re reluctant to add a new tool just because it’s perfect. You might be tempted to just say no, give the reasoning, and leave it, and sometimes that will work. But you may find yourself saying the same “no” over and over again, giving the same reasons. “No, we need to have more people who know that language; we need to understand what it means to put that language into production.” “No, we need to have standards for logging; we need to think about what testing would look like.” When you start repeating yourself, you have the basis for a reasonable policy. That policy consists of the hard requirements that must be met in order to say yes, and some guidelines for thinking about the decision. Making a policy helps your team know in advance the cost of getting to “yes.” “Help Me Say Yes” Policies are useful, but they don’t cover every case. The next strategy, “help me say yes,” is similar to policy writing, but works better for the one-off instances where there is no clear policy. Sometimes you’ll hear ideas that seem very ill-considered. “Help me say yes” means you ask questions and dig in on the elements that seem so questionable to you. Often...