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Comment by beernet | Hacker News Reader

>> instead of execs telling us “you should do X”, we figure out what we think will have the most impact to our customers and work on building those features and tools

What could possibly go wrong here?

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What do you mean? The quoted text is the exact strategy I always use.

I don't want or need to be told top down what to do, it's better to think for myself and propose that upward. Execs appreciate it because it makes their jobs easier; users get the features they actually want; I get to work on what I think is important.

What am I missing that makes this a bad strategy?

If your proposal doesn't align with leadership vision or the product they want to grow...

Well you factor that in too? And be willing to change focus if that's the feedback.

This can still be okay - but you have to be correct in a way that the company values. This of course needs to be without doing something against the rest of the company - either legally or sabotaging some other product are both out. Values is most commonly money, but there are other things the company values at times..

In my experience (I make tools for the network and security guys): that's why you don't propose only one thing. We often have one new project every year, we propose multiple ways to go about it, the leadership ask us to explore 2-3 solutions, we come back with data and propose our preferred solution, the leadership say 'ok' (after a very technical two-hour meeting) and propose minor alterations (or sometimes they want to alter our database design to make it 'closer' to the user experience...)

I think this is the most efficient approach. Decisions should be made at the lowest possible level of the org chart.

However, it has an important assumption: You are sufficiently aware of higher level things. If you have a decent communication culture in your company or if you are around long enough to know someone everywhere, it should be fine though.

More often than not, things don't turn out too well if engineers decide what to build without tight steering from customers and/or upper management. This is exactly what it sounds like here. Tech for the purpose of tech. I understand this is HN and we have a pro-engineering bias here, at the same time, engineers don't tend to be the greatest strategists.

Customers and management should always be part of the loop. This is reflected in the original quote and my comment.

I just think that having to be micromanaged from the top down is completely miserable, is worse for the customer, and is time consuming for execs. It’s not a way to live.

You as an engineer should be familiar with users’ needs. I got into this field because I love automating solutions that help users solve their problems. So of course I want to know what they’re doing, and have a good idea of what would improve their lives further.

The article was about how he doesn't work on a product team and only builds internal tools for other coworkers and doesn't need all of that overhead

The same things that go wrong anyway?

Nothing, except maybe an asteroid hitting the building and wiping out the entire team?

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