1 - “A Seat At The Table”

Note

This is the first, and most important point, of this entire document. If you take away nothing else, I believe you can still find success if you can manage to integrate this into your company.

“A Seat At The Table” means just what it says; that Engineering should be included in & have a say when decision-making.

This is a philosophy that should be present at all layers of both the business & engineering. Naturally, the scope & context should change with the situation at-hand.

This also the most difficult, because it requires business-wide, top-to-bottom adoption (ugh, fine, nee: buy-in). Your C-staff has to be committed to it, your product/sales teams have to be including you, your most junior engineer has to be trying their best at it. Consider yourself warned, but this is also why it works & is so important.

What It Is

“A Seat At The Table” means an appropriate member (or members) of Engineering are present in decision-making. At a C-level, this means that when budgeting or roadmapping/planning or reviewing is happening, your CTO/Director/highest member(s) of Engineering are included in those and contributing.

At a mid-level, when sales is prepping the quarter’s pitches, a senior member of Engineering (and/or a sales engineer if you’ve got them) is offered the chance to help with ideas, or to sit-in/review pitches for accuracy.

When Product is planning a feature, or doing the early review with Design on the UI/UX of a feature, it means a senior engineer and/or engineers on that will be doing the work on that cross-functional team are involved. They are helping to guide scope, find pain points early, and to help find shortcuts/low-hanging fruit!

When engineering is knee-deep on a feature, it means the junior engineer who was last-minute handed the “reporting-work-that-got-overlooked-during-planning” gets invites to the remaining project meetings, they’re given access to other engineers on the feature, they’re highlighting where possible performance issues from expensive queries may come up (& are taken seriously). And they get ear-marked to be included in both the feature review, as well as participate in the next feature planning meeting.

It is equal parts privilege and responsibility. It’s a commitment by Engineering that they’ll engage with the rest of the company on even-terms. That appropriate time & care will be committed to answering questions for other teams. That Engineering will make time for those meetings, as well as commit to making features a best-effort reality.

It has to be a two-way street, it has to involve dialogue, it has to be respectful by everyone & to everyone.

It is enablement of your employees, your people. Give them the power to control their fate/destiny.

What It Isn’t

“A Seat At The Table” isn’t a veto card. It’s not an overruling vote. It’s a equal say in what priorities should be.

“A Seat At The Table” is NOT a God-mode cheat code to get out of doing the work. It’s a chance to point out difficult hurdles/impossibilities, or future pain points, ahead of time and commit to finding workarounds/stop-gaps/alternative features with the other teams or departments.

It is NEVER to be used to disrepect/dismiss anyone else, not even the janitor. Zero tolerance is to be given to this kind of abuse/behavior.