Thanks orta for the links!
On not having to ask permission.
We failed early. Had a wonderful demo day. Tons of sign ups. It started getting a bit long. Someone decided to shorten each session (max 2 minutes) and choose which ones were worth demoing. So you basically asked for permission to demo. Sign ups stopped. Nobody wanted to demo anymore. Demo day died and took a year to restart properly.
In general, establish “how”. Everything is in writing and GitHub workflow. When someone says “can I?” the answer is “why are you asking and haven’t done it (submit PR) yet”? This moves permission to a public discussion.
Think in terms of must have, should have, nice to have, not allow/disallow.
Managers already have the power to veto, so they don’t need to approve, allow or disallow. Managers need to say that to everyone all the time - “you have an idea, why haven’t you done it yet?”.
Everyone needs to do things very visibly and over communicate to enable gentle redirects and avoiding getting to veto.
Losing control is hard. Communications team wanted to review and control the engineering blog. I said hard no multiple times with every new comms leader. Asked them to comment on PRs.
Don’t fix problems that don’t exist. If someone wants a knob that looks like permission, ask them what problem they are trying to solve.
On not having to ask permission.
We failed early. Had a wonderful demo day. Tons of sign ups. It started getting a bit long. Someone decided to shorten each session (max 2 minutes) and choose which ones were worth demoing. So you basically asked for permission to demo. Sign ups stopped. Nobody wanted to demo anymore. Demo day died and took a year to restart properly.
In general, establish “how”. Everything is in writing and GitHub workflow. When someone says “can I?” the answer is “why are you asking and haven’t done it (submit PR) yet”? This moves permission to a public discussion.
Think in terms of must have, should have, nice to have, not allow/disallow.
Managers already have the power to veto, so they don’t need to approve, allow or disallow. Managers need to say that to everyone all the time - “you have an idea, why haven’t you done it yet?”.
Everyone needs to do things very visibly and over communicate to enable gentle redirects and avoiding getting to veto.
Losing control is hard. Communications team wanted to review and control the engineering blog. I said hard no multiple times with every new comms leader. Asked them to comment on PRs.
Don’t fix problems that don’t exist. If someone wants a knob that looks like permission, ask them what problem they are trying to solve.