{"id":1290,"date":"2016-07-11T17:34:45","date_gmt":"2016-07-12T00:34:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/briantroy.com\/blog\/?p=1290"},"modified":"2025-01-03T04:55:27","modified_gmt":"2025-01-03T04:55:27","slug":"only-doing-what-we-can-execute-now-is-a-terrible-strategy-here-is-prescription-for-unsticking-your-engineering-team","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogarchive.briantroy.com\/index.php\/2016\/07\/11\/only-doing-what-we-can-execute-now-is-a-terrible-strategy-here-is-prescription-for-unsticking-your-engineering-team\/","title":{"rendered":"“Only doing what we can execute now” is a terrible strategy – a prescription for unsticking your engineering team."},"content":{"rendered":"
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Photo Credit: Radarsmum67 on Flickr<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I engage with a lot of engineering teams (and leaders) that are stuck. They know full well they need to do something to enable thier product, service or business team – but they can’t get started.<\/p>\n

In almost every case I find a culture of resistance – which can be best summarized as:<\/p>\n

I don’t think we can execute that – I mean, we’ve never done it before and have no idea how to do it.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I sympathize – I really do – but only signing up to execute what the team already knows how to do is accepting defeat. Yes, I understand, you’ve never used a document database; nope – you’ve never used a horizontally scalable messaging infrastructure; true, you don’t have any experts in WebRTC; yes, I get that you don’t even know what technology to think about to solve this problem.<\/p>\n

My prescription in these cases is simple:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Figure out the smallest valuable thing you can implement – and implement it<\/strong><\/em>.\n