Impact for the Impatient
Advice for quickly making technical and cultural progress in an uncertain environment.
We ask senior engineers to join new, dysfunctional projects and quickly make progress. Here are some tricks for leaping in and getting things done.
Get a few easy wins
Your early projects should be things that are visible and medium-complexity. They’ve probably been lingering in the bug queue for a while, or get mentioned in the team meeting as “almost done” for weeks on end. Fix some flakey tests, finish that data migration, add some features to your customer support tools.
Pick things that require decisiveness and judgement rather than sweeping re-architecture and organization-wide collaboration. The Giant Maybe Unsolvable Problem will be easier after you’ve shown you can get things done.
Fail quickly and loudly
You will make mistakes. When this happens, tell everyone: "I tried this, it didn't work, now we're going to try..."
Don’t get stuck. Make it ok to try things, fail, and iterate towards something better.
Ask "stupid" questions
All teams are calcified to some degree. People have forgotten why they are doing things in a certain way. You are new here, so take the opportunity to ask "stupid" questions. You will surprise people, and you will learn a ton about the specifics of the team culture.
Assimilate the language
Absorb as many keywords from your environment as you can. Replay someone else's acronym-laden status update as a question. Translate jargon back into English. Your teammates will thank you; they’ve forgotten some of those codenames too.
Bring other people along
Whenever possible, offer these principles to your less experienced teammates and support them from behind. Ask them to walk into the big meeting and ask "stupid" questions. Be there to say "Of course, I was going to ask the same thing."
Help them select and accomplish small goals. Ask them why they are stalled and remove some roadblocks (maybe just do the last code review or deployment yourself). Remind them that the risk of failure is smaller than they think.
Thank you to Tanya for asking "didn't you write something about getting quick wins?" and editing this version.
Internal version for people still trapped inside the Rainbow Borg.