Drawing from the three elements of trust (Motivation, Integrity, and Competence), Randy Shoup discusses how engineering leaders can work and communicate effectively with their product and business counterparts. In the first section, we discuss * Outcomes Over Outputs * Integrity and Transparency * Continuous Delivery and Estimation In the second section, we apply these ideas in three common scenarios faced by engineering leaders: * "We Need to Go Faster" * Technical Debt * Site Incident

1. Communicating Effectively
with Business Partners
Randy Shoup
@randyshoup
linkedin.com/in/randyshoup

2. @randyshoup
Background

3. Elements of Trust
•Motivation
•Integrity
•Competence

4. Elements of Trust
•Motivation
•Integrity
•Competence

5. Outcomes
Over
Outputs
@randyshoup

6. Business Outcomes
• Clear business metrics
o Revenue, profit, market share, etc.
• Clear customer metrics
o Performance of key customer flows
o Failed Customer Interactions
o Availability to Business
@randyshoup

7. Engineering Outcomes
@randyshoup
Accelerate State of DevOps Report, 2019

8. Outputs
(Track them; don’t manage to them)
• “Train Seats”
• Story points
• Lines of Code
• Code coverage
@randyshoup

9. “What Problem Are
We Trying to Solve?”
@randyshoup

10. Engineering Discipline
• Engineers are trained in
disciplined problem-
solving
o Not everyone is 
• It is our job to help
clarify and refine the
problem
@randyshoup

11. “A problem well-stated
is a problem half-solved.”
-- Charles Kettering,
head of research at GM
@randyshoup

12. Engineering is about solving
problems …
@randyshoup
… Sometimes we solve those
problems by writing code.

13. Elements of Trust
•Motivation
•Integrity
•Competence

14. “Tell It Like It Is”
• Share both good news and bad news
o Never hide the situation
• Share engineering context
o Given common context, well-meaning people generally agree
• ”Disagree and Commit”
@randyshoup

15. “The Curse of Knowledge”
• We understand the
options, tradeoffs,
and implications
• It is our job to help
our partners
understand them
@randyshoup

16. Regular Communication
• Regular structured communication
o Up, laterally, down
o Just as important when things are good as when things are bad
• Visibility into status and issues
o Similar to monitoring a service!
@randyshoup

17. “The half-life
of trust is
six weeks.”
-- Steve McConnell
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18. “Transparency is
Power”
@randyshoup

19. Elements of Trust
•Motivation
•Integrity
•Competence

20. Continuous Delivery
• Show a consistent trajectory of incremental value
• Deliver on commitments
• When things don’t go as planned …
o Be Honest
o Provide Options
@randyshoup

21. Feature 1
Feature 2
Feature 3
Feature 4
Feature 5
Too Much in Parallel
Month 4
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22. Deliver Incremental Value
Month 4
Month 2
1a 1b 1c 1d
2a 2b 2c
3a 3b 3c 3d
4a 4b 4c
5a 5b
@randyshoup

24. Estimating Effort
• Honor request
o Planning and resource allocation
o Coordinating resources and dependencies (Marketing, Purchasing, etc.)
• Communicate Uncertainty
o Perfect accuracy is impossible, rarely required
o Ranges, progressively refined over time
o Time-boxed work
@randyshoup

25. Elements of Trust
•Motivation
•Integrity
•Competence

26. Scenario 1:
“We Need to Go
Faster”
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27. Negotiating Tradeoffs
@randyshoup
Scope
Time
Quality

28. “Here is what I
need …”
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29. Scenario 2:
Technical Debt
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30. Frame the Problem:
Quality and reliability are
business concerns
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31. Use Common Currency
Time
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Money People

32. Improvement Budget
• Explicit resource investment
o Agree on an up-front investment
(e.g., 25%, 30% of engineering efforts)
• Retain autonomy, Provide transparency
o Making these decisions is exactly why they hired you
@randyshoup

33. Scenario 3:
Site Incident
@randyshoup

34. During the Incident
• Focus on restoring service
o Everything else is secondary, and should wait
• Shield the team
• Clear, structured communication
o Even when there is nothing to report!
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35. After the Incident
• Blameless postmortem
• Identify and understand the
contributing factors
• Action items and Learnings
• Follow Up!
@randyshoup

36. 15 Million
“Never let a
good crisis go
to waste.”
@randyshoup

37. “Incidents are unplanned
investments, and they are also
opportunities. Your challenge
is to maximize the ROI on the
sunk cost.”
@randyshoup
-- John Allspaw, Adaptive Capacity Labs

38. Elements of Trust
•Motivation
•Integrity
•Competence

39. “If you can’t
change your organization,
change your organization.”
-- Martin Fowler
@randyshoup

40. Thank you!
@randyshoup
linkedin.com/in/randyshoup
medium.com/@randyshoup