S1E1: Sarah Wells on Strategy and Engineering Effectiveness

In the debut of Velocity's Edge podcast, host Nicko Goncharoff speaks with Engineering Effectiveness Lead Consultant Sarah Wells about the importance of strategy to engineering effectiveness. Sarah is a recognized leader in software engineering, with a focus on microservices, DevOps, and engineering enablement. She played a pivotal role at the Financial Times, where she helped scale deployments from 12 to 20,000 releases per year. A frequent speaker and the author of Enabling Microservices Success.Sarah has worked in a lot of places where it's been very hard to understand what the strategy is,  and posits that,  if you were to ask the average engineer in the average company, even in places where there is a technical strategy, you'd find that most employees don't know what it is. That's because companies - especially tech companies - often don't share their strategy  enough internally so that people know exactly what it is. If you want to have autonomous teams that are able to make their own decisions, you want that autonomy to be what people at Spotify call "aligned autonomy." So we are all at least going in the same direction. What you don't want is the case in which every team is autonomous but they're all pulling in completely different directions, so you're not moving with purpose in the direction that the company needs you to move. This 20-minute episode uses plain business English to describe the business impacts of technology implementation, and the technical impacts of business decisions that don't consider their effects on velocity.