Software Engineering at Google: Lessons Learned from Programming Over Time

by Titus Winters

When you get to work each day, ask yourself a different critical question: What can I do that nobody else on my team can do? There are a number of good answers. For example, you can protect your teams from organizational politics; you can give them encouragement; you can make sure everyone is treating one another well, creating a culture of humility, trust, and respect. It’s also important to “manage up,” making sure your management chain understands what your group is doing and staying connected to the company at large. But often the most common and important answer to this question is: “I can see the forest through the trees.” In other words, you can define a high-level strategy. Your strategy needs to cover not just overall technical direction, but an organizational strategy as well. You’re building a blueprint for how the ambiguous problem is solved and how your organization can manage the problem over time. You’re continuously mapping out the forest, and then assigning the tree-cutting to others.