A Staff Engineer's Guide to Inventing Work
9 hours ago
- Platform teams are engineering-led, requiring engineers to invent work without a product manager.
- Signals for inventing work come from four sources: systems, users, organization, and industry.
- System signals include crash-led discovery, cost analysis, and toil reduction.
- User signals involve continuous discovery, overloaded use-cases, and partner-to-prototype approaches.
- Org signals are OKRs, manager-repetition heuristic, and migration debris from laggards.
- Industry signals use descriptive writing to derive prescriptive ideas and leverage lag as arbitrage.
- Rank signals by how much argument they provide vs. being leading or lagging; e.g., crashes are lagging but cheap, overloaded use-cases are leading and mid-cost.