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Given the support for this answer I will likely get downvoted for this, but I disagree with this advice.

I am a co-founder (and CTO) of a small company myself and hence get to talk to the folks in my company quite regularly. I disagree with the notion that passion or personal preference doesn't belong in a decision-making process. Not only does it belong there, it is even a critical part of it, assuming of course that you have good arguments to make for your point and convey it in a respectful and professional manner.

Having passion and personal preference displays that you are engaged in your job and identify with the work that you do and aren't afraid to speak your mind, which requires a certain level of trust. Even more, you were hired precisely because the company came to the conclusion that it can benefit from your (uncensored) input.

It sure depends on the context but presenting your thoughts as "one option is to...", is a marker that you are indifferent to the outcome. It generally does not display trust, confidence or engagement.

So, if your manager is worth her/his money he/she can handle strong opinions just fine and will also consider other viewpoints than yours in the decision making process.

W.r.t. "talk like a leader, not like an engineer", king_panic has the best answer IMO.

Interesting that you’re actually advocating for this type of “lord of the flies” culture. It actually indicates your org doesn’t have clear direction or technical competence (imo). I’d personally be wary of joining such a company. I’ve been a part of too many directionless zombies myself.

This might be the most uncharitable reading possible of what they wrote. Having people advocate for different decisions hardly means that the company is a “directionless zombie”. In fact, it’s exactly the opposite. Having a culture where people don’t advocate for something but just go along with whatever is handed down to them from on high sounds a lot more zombie-like to me.

I guess I’ve worked on to many apps that resulted from this sort of thing, over the course of years. In reality, everyone gets a voice and every opinion matters devolves to the vocal minority doing what they want, damn the consequences. Similar to online discussion forums really. It’s almost tautological that this vocal minority does NOT have the best interest of the product or company in mind, but only their own self aggrandizement and careerism.

Somebody at the top ought to have a vision and ability to work with feedback from real customers with real needs to deliver a product that users love and continue to pay for.

If you write an app idiots can use, idiots will

A fabulously illustrative email sig from the type of people who “win” in these orgs.

I disagree. Talking about options is _not_ a black-and-white issue, and I feel that seeing this as being indifferent is somewhat of a stretch. Why not outline the options and their respective consequences (as far as you can observe them) as objectively as possible? Here's an example:

'One option is to do it this way. This has the following advantages. Moreover, we could also do it that way. This will likely result in ...'

And of course you _can_ give your preference---but you should be upfront about this. For example:

'Personally, I think it might be worth to pursue option 1 more because of ...'

Strong opinions are one thing, but being capable of seeing alternatives is also very, very valid. Not every [business] decision has _one_ easy answer.

(disclaimer: I am talking about my experience with academic teams inside academia; this is not 100% transferable to the business world, I would wager)

Yeah, the other thing to consider is that as you go up the chain the people you're talking to have more context across the business and may know something you don't.

Outlining options with consequences helps them make the right decision in the macro. I've have many decisions from the technical side that made sense but we're absolutely the wrong choice once I had more context around what other teams planned or the business constraints.

Making sound decisions in engineering has nothing with personal preferences or passion. All too often these interfere with the process and, in fact, usually hide the lack of vision.

I agree. I'd restate it in a way that applies to both engineering and management: It's ok to be very opinionated about your job. You're paid the big bucks to be an expert, what's the point if you don't have a strong idea of what the Right Thing To Do(TM) is? If I go to a PM or manager with questions on a feature I'm supposed to develop I sure hope they have a strong opinion about what I'm supposed to be building!

Opinionated is orthogonal to being persuasive though. To work on a team you need both; you can't just say what you think is right without evidence and you need to be able to persuade others on your team that you're right. And it's orthogonal to being self aware as well, in particular knowing when you're wrong or a battle isn't worth winning.

I used to provide several options with background and rationale to my boss.

One day, he said, with a slightly frustrated tone, something along the lines of : "Andy: you're providing what appear to be good options and detail here - but someone in a "senior" position should recommend a path forward. Don't just give me 3 options that I need to then go and figure out for myself."

from that point on I've always tried to provide a hard recommendation - and rationale that includes a sort of decision tree approach. "We start with ______ [with good reasons to do so] then if X comes to pass we continue with it and if Y comes to pass we can pick a a different path with another option I have as backup."

The result seems to often be a discussion more about the upsides/downsides and decision tree relative to the business the organization is trying to support (a good thing) vs technical merits of the options which the technical team is trusted to be well versed in.

This is the approach I often take. I'm paid to be an expert and have answers. If the situation has multiple paths, it is on me to weigh those with the context I have and be prepared to adapt when I inquire about other considerations I may have been previously unaware of.

There's nothing wrong with having an informed opinion as long as it isn't presented in a combative or selfish manner.

That said, depending on who else may be in the room, if you naturally take that approach, it is often good to sit back and let others speak, or encourage them to if they are not the assertive type. Leadership is as much (if not more) about listening than speaking.

There seems to be a confusion or overlap between what a CTO and a CEO needs to do in terms of leadership, they have different audiences.

While CTOs are expected to be heavily technical and fact based, CEOs often negotiate based on feelings, trust, wrong data and emotions with other parties (mostly non-tech) where it does make sense to open several options.

Any engineer growing into leadership will increasingly need to deal with non-tech people that will find the strong engineering opinions as leaving them out of the decision process, and subsequently be offended by that fact.

CTOs have little resilience to bullshit, they aren't known for soft-skills either and tend to be seen as leading the pack. There is a fine line of what being a leader means, depending very much on who your audience is.

You can always come up with two options, for any problem. If one of them is terrible or expensive, say it anyway, and now you look like you’re making justified decisions and thinking things through.

The brilliance of “Design Thinking” is basically the same thing — designers and creative thinkers do their work as usual, but they present it as if they’re following some kind of methodology that even people who don’t understand the work can get around.

In the background, all of your engineering decisions are likely based in some kind of business truth, so bring it out and talk about it instead of Java GC tuning or other non-business nonsense.

A former Tech leader where I work used to say "Never say you can't do something. Just provide options, cost and consequences. The business/management/client will make the decision for you."

This is super important. Having someone come to the conclusion you care to on their own will solidify it in their own heads as their idea, making it an obvious choice. I’ve even gone so far as to argue against it with a few surface arguments, to cement it in their minds.

Is that manipulative? Sometimes. But if it’s for the benefit of the team, you do what has to be done.

This is literally the secret to being successful at business and politics.

I'm continually surprised by how many people don't recognize this as such a massive differentiator in one's ability to be persuasive.

I imagine this leading to situations where you say things like, “pursuing option X would require a research project of indeterminate cost and time, likely longer than 7 years for a 10-person team”

Never say no, always say yes but say what the costs are.

One place where this can fall down is when the cost is along the lines of "if we do X then we're closing down the option of doing Y" later.

Unless the business/management/client is better than average, there's a large risk that they'll say "fine, whatever, we want X", then a year later ask for Y and be unhappy that it's impossible or very expensive.

Speaking as a technical founder... That is ok.

"A cynic knows the price of everything and the value of nothing."

Marketing / sales / bd / etc do not understand most of the variables engineering is working theough. They can be big: impacting price to build/extend and when it starts being a profit center! The tricky bit is those depts also have their own tracked variables that need to be rolled into the decision. Non-engineering variables can also be critical: E.g., going to market before others, hitting some top account or partner, growing revenue by x% compounding now and using that to pay for tech debt, or even learning the workaround isn't worth improving from the customer's/market's perspective.

The humbling thing is no one has all the info, from engineering and product to sales and marketing to the execs. That is where your job comes in. So communicating opportunities at the level of time/cost/growth within engineering's field of view, and making this a non-unilateral discussion. (And if you are good, invisibly sneaking in color around all your other operational glue: who is doing well, what new ideas came in, etc.)

Agreed.

> Avoid picking favorite solutions and presenting them as the clear winner or only option.

That depends how stupid the management is. I remember when an ex-colleague of mine was designing a big complex thing (a mixed signal ASIC, if you care). He was a mere engineer. All the big decisions had to have management approval. But the management didn't understand much about how the complex thing worked. He tried the, "we must do this and that" approach, without success. He eventually figured out that he needed to present options. But it didn't seem to matter if all but one of the options were stupid. As long as there was a graph showing one option being better than the others, then the management could chose the option with the big score and feel like they were in control.

Moral - Figuring out how to control your boss is a good strategy but probably only works if you are cleverer than they are. I prefer having a boss who is clever than me and when I say, "we must do this", they explain why that's a stupid idea.

I have seen this in my own example.

I usually would say "To run website for customer X, we have to setup separate database server because their requirement is not having multi tenancy".

What I found out, it is something you can communicate to fellow engineer when all tasks are signed off. It is technically correct, and I did not understood why it would not be valid statement.

When you are in meeting with higher ups planning roll out for that customer, there is no "we have to". There are only options and maybe that customer was just shooting from the hip with those requirements and if we tell him what the price is we won't have that customer or he will reduce his wish list. So it would be "To run website for customer X, one option is setup new server but it will be 100$ a month and one person working on it for 2-4 days to have configuration working and tested".

Setting up separate server is not interesting part for business. Setting up server for me is interesting part because I have to put it in the context of our infrastructure, what rights should be assigned to that server, what packages I need to install on it.

When in Rome, do as the Romans do.

So, when talking to C-levels/suite, speak as they do. Listen to them for 10mins, and mirror the language.

C-suite need to say 10 things in 1 line.

When speaking technical the opposite happens. Speaking 10 lines to explain 1 thing.

Keep in mind, they don't expand. They compress/winzip/winrar.

The above 'option' is a great manner and I will change this in my vocabulary starting today!

The nice thing about presenting options along with their pros and cons is the option accepted by management also has its attached cons explicitly accepted too (often in writing)

Not sure if I agree.

When you give options, you can still have a strong preference for one or the other. Like logo A v. Logo B. It can be passive agressive to make one option looks very good and the other looks like shit. Whereas a transparent conversation will be, I really like option A, but at the end of the day is your area of responsability and if you want to do option B it’s perfectly fine.

The way I do it is mention the options and my preferred option with the justification on why my preference is better. That shows that I have thought through the problem and possible solutions carefully.

Thank you! This is so helpful.

Sigh. I suppose another batch of engineers will read this and start participating in rounds of bullshit instead of just doing what is clearly the right thing to do. If there are options, present options. If you know only one good way to do it, just say so.

As someone who has to continually push back against people who have the "one good way to do it", I'd prefer everything was presented as options.

People make these statements in front of customers and then we have to dance around it to the next option. It takes a hint of introspection to know when you might not have all the bases covered in your head before pushing things out of your mouth.

Saying something is an option at least can be interpreted as not being fully sure at this second, whereas saying "we have to do this" and being wrong just makes you look incompetent as a representative of my team.

Not doing something is still an "option".

I've had situations where I think one path forward is the clearly only sane option. But because I was told years ago to present options I say, "Okay, option X will will take a week to set up and cost $100 a month. Option Y will take three months to setup and cost $20,000 a month." But management doesn't bat an eye, they reply "Oh great! No problem, we'll get you the budget for option Y." And while I fight to keep my chin from hitting the floor, they sign off on the funds and move on the next item on the meeting agenda.

And what do I care? My conscience is clear because I presented the facts as I know them. And we get staff and budget as needed. Maybe there was some political motivation I didn't know, maybe the exec wanted to justify higher budget. Fine. I did my job and things move on.