If you’re focusing on enabling engineers here is how to get executive buy-in.
Starting a team dedicated to improving software development is a big task.
It can be difficult to explain to executive leadership why they should fund such an endeavor.
Why should they invest in new engineers or risk slowing down development while chasing efficiencies?
The answer?
Reducing friction and bottlenecks is essential to innovation and growth.
Fast and flexible software delivery is a competitive advantage that cannot be ignored.
Here’s how to prove it to them:
- Find a big problem to solve.
- This should be a problem that is happening now, not a future problem.
- The more this problem is tied to the executive’s success, the better.
- Ask to dedicate a very small team (a handful of engineers) to solving this problem.
- The idea here is to present as little risk as possible while featuring a big benefit.
- Its helpful to have an idea and a high-level roadmap to solve this problem.
- You may not even need executive approval at this stage, your immediate leader can probably approve this.
- Solve the problem.
- Generate a larger list of problems that are negatively impacting your organization’s goals.
- These don’t have to be as big.
- Having at least some ideas on potential solutions are helpful.
- Connect the dots for your execs. Show how investing in solving these problems leads to a business objective (i.e. faster feature delivery, fewer outages, reduced risk)
Understand that this will take time and it isn’t a perfect formula.
But!
This is a great first step to creating a developer experience team at your organization.
Let me know how it goes.
Best,
Andre
P.S. If you don’t know what that BIG problem is or how to solve it let me know. I can help.