How to convince senior leadership to invest in initiatives?
My team has some internal priorities/projects that will make us more productive, greatly improve the quality of our work in the long run, etc. (Benefits would be fewer bugs, faster deployments, faster onboarding, cleaner code, more scalable projects) Is there a good strategy to convince senior leadership that we need time to work on these internal projects? Right now, we have other high priority items that the team works on (high priority meaning value-creating work that brings in money). And because of these high priority items, our internal projects keep getting pushed back forever. Hoping to have a step-by-step strategy that will convince senior management that our internal priorities will help the team and company greatly in the long run. If there’s “books/articles” on how to do that, those would help too. #engineering #software #swe #facebook #google #amazon #aws #uber #citadel #goldmansachs #jpmorgan #apple #lyft #twosigma #tc
https://staffeng.com/about/ In general you have 3 options: 1. Have clout - once you build enough trust you are usually trusted to have some ammount of time resources (yourself,your team etc.) to direct as you see fit. 2. have an explicit plan - lie out exactly what it costs to do something (including all the boring planning SWAG stuff) 3. Have a cost/tradeoff with what it would take to do it. See https://staffeng.com/guides/present-to-executives
Thanks. This is super helpful.
See if these can be tied to org initiatives like tech initiatives cloud native, cloud cost optimization, platform stability by upgrading to support 5X growth back by what is the benefit like savings of x Million per year or operational excellence savings of x Person hours due to automation
Thanks. That’s a good way to think about it!
State the business value. Your stating everything in eng terms but how does this translate to helping the business? You need to quantify how much more this will make developers more efficient and how that turns into value for the business. If you can quantify dev time saved and that means faster development cycles that's money saved