You know exactly why your engineering team has slowed down.
You know why there are daily grumbles from your developers and why it’s so frustrating to make seemingly small changes to the system. You know why you are shipping buggy releases. The trouble is, you can’t seem to convince management to let you do the work. Or, worse, you CAN convince them, but it always falls off the priority road map; feature development takes first place.
Why is it so hard to convince others of what is so obvious to you? Because you are doing it wrong.
Come and learn from my mistakes and my successes pitching a large refactor project when I was a Senior Staff at Slack. I will tell you about my experience tech leading a major internationalization and localization project that I turned into an infrastructure rearchitecture project. My small and mighty team of four ended up saving us months and month of development time, reducing overall development time by ~65% and leaving the code much easier to understand.
I will show two example pitches: one is a typical pitch scenario that I’ve seen get rejected time after time, and the other is similar to the pitch that was accepted for the large infrastructure project at Slack.
