Engineers often complain that “we don’t do enough investment”. We leave code to rot over many years; accidents waiting to happen or mud that slows down our shipping speed.
Engineers go into battle with product managers, arguing for investment over new features, and we lose. Over and over again. And when you look at the different backgrounds and skill sets – perhaps that’s not surprising. As an ex-consultant myself, I can confirm that persuasion is the name of the game. And most engineers don’t get taught to persuade at all.
This isn’t sensible – unless the engineers are hugely over-estimating the benefit of doing the investment work, the organization isn’t making good choices. And the battle mentality is clearly counter-productive: driving barriers between two groups whose entire job description is about collaboration.
We need to fix this, and we can. This talk will help you understand and sell the value of investment work so that you can collaborate with non-engineers to get it prioritized.
