A Human-centered Approach TL;DR 👑 Shipping is queen. 🔭 Visualize and define success early on. 🤹 Don’t forget to include performance monitoring and KPI analysis. 🎯 Principal engineer is a leadership role. Think about your involvement in the project. For me, operating as a principal software engineer is all about bringing engineering, business, and people close together. Usually, you’re one of the first technical representatives in the organization to hear about a project as a principal engineer, and you need to make an internal dialog to either pursue or discard it. There are many things to consider in terms of time budget, resources, stakeholder communication, and even your own involvement when it comes to planning. So I want to share with you how I think about planning as a principal engineer and what are the important questions to ask in the planning phase of the project. Is It The Right Project? You’ll hear about the project in different maturities depending on how your organization normally generates business ideas. It could range from an observation of a potential user need to “we need it in three months”. Regardless, a simplified train of thought looks like this: Do or don’t do? If “do”, is it the right timing? What’s the engineering complexity? How’s the effort? Do we have the resources? Do or don’t do? There are many more factors. What I’m suggesting is simply: Follow your gut😎 Usually, you’ll have an intuition, excitement, or an energetic feeling, to say yes to the project. To develop the intuition over time, there are a few exercises I find very useful to formulate my engineering opinion: Learn your industry and the competitive landscape. Learn your organization’s strategy. (If you’re like me not really knowing what “strategy” means in the business world, I highly recommend the book “ ” by A.G. Lafley and Roger L. Martin.) Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works Align the project with the organization’s s. OKR Talk to the designers about the user needs and pain points in their research. Talk to the project managers(PM) or product owners(PO) about the market research. Visualize your organization’s project portfolio. Just by looking at it, you’ll get a better sense of the balance between short-term and long-term commitments, team/project allocation, and buffer for adaption. If you are not sure about how to prioritize it, you can work on a with your team to figure out where the project stands. A Prioritization Matrix looks like this: Prioritization Matrix Note that is critical in the process because it will reveal how people in different disciplines think about the importance and urgency of the projects. It’s a invisible third axis of the matrix. Voting based on expertise What Does Success Look Like? Visualizing what success looks like early on helps you in many ways: Solidify your gut feeling about the project. Communicate the goal and alignment with OKRs to others more clearly. Design KPIs to measure the progress and impact. I like to use to put my thoughts in a . It is a great way to put people in the same frame of mind just by “seeing” what happens after the finish line. Amazon’s “Working Backwards” approach press release I use the press release as the starting point to invite conversations and consolidate the references to the documentation. Usually includes: Project epics or overview. UI Design mockups. Engineering system designs. KPI analytics. How to Ship It ASAP? “Ship to learn.” It became my guiding principle ever since I read about this quote. shares the same idea in their leadership principles and I think the mindset is the foundation of lean and agile software development because it’s: GitHub human-centered and user-focused. powered by iterations of feedback and learning. measurable. I like to use as a framework to think about the problems and how to iterate throughout the project. Combining with the press release and KPIs, it’s a great way to validate your assumptions and stay in the course. Design Thinking is another great tool to crack a problem and kick start the exploration. Most importantly, it’s fun🤩 Design Sprint When you’re facing a complex project, make sure your system design proposals include alternatives that are simpler and quicker to build. It’ll allow the teams to iterate faster. The takeaway here is to really focus on , instead of implementing a complete solution. delivering the project to the users’ hands What about KPI Analysis? It’s very useful to look at business KPIs and UX KPIs side by side to get a better sense of the data. It’s important to dive into the analysis with PMs and designers to find out the direction of the next iteration. There are a few basic concepts in statistics I learned that are useful to collaborate with Business Intelligence and Design teams. Permutation Testing p-value A/B Testing A/B/n Testing Multivariate testing Multi-armed bandit When To Do Multivariate Tests Instead of A/B/n Tests The Multi-Armed Bandit Problem and Its Solutions Is Performance Monitoring in Place? Technical performance is another opportunity to inject engineering context into discussions for the next iterations. In general, there are : two types of monitoring Real User Monitoring (RUM) Synthetic Monitoring RUM is about live data. It tells a story of real user behavior and how your system performs over time. Synthetic monitoring reports data of your system in a controlled environment so it’s suitable for , , and . static analysis regressions testing performance testing Here are some useful tools for monitoring: Grafana Google Lighthouse autocannon Cypress K6 Performance API Clinic.js Should I code as A Principal Software Engineer? I believe you should, but the bottom line is to empower engineers and make sure your involvement doesn’t block or interfere with the iterations. Many principal engineers have but I truly believe that if and you love it, you should code. The question is more about you should be coding. different opinions and experiences coding is your craft when and where My introduced a model to me called . I use it to think about my involvement in projects. It looks like this: leadership coach Situational Leadership The model suggests that there are 4 types of leadership styles and you can fluidly choose the styles to lead based on the situations. For situations of supporting and coaching, I think the best place and time to code are: Prototyping. Hackathon. Tooling for developer experience. Data visualization. Your intention is to maintain a certain level of involvement and visibility to the projects to provide support when needed. The situation happens usually in important projects with a longer time frame. They are also the type of projects that you spend time on mentoring and sponsoring engineers. For situations of directing, I think it’s better not to code because you’re highly invested in the direction of the project. You’ll be doing a lot of analyses and communications. Hands-on work often distracts you from your focus. Final Thoughts We touched on the questions I find useful in planning: Is it the right project? What does success look like? How to ship it ASAP? What about KPI analysis? Is performance monitoring in place? Should I code as a principal software engineer? It’s important to know that there’s no specific order to these questions. You can think about them in different sequences depending on your situation. What’s important is that at the end of the planning, you have a clear idea of how to iterate through your assumptions and bring the project live to the users. References Articles Amazon’s Working Backwards approach — Quora Amazon’s Working Backwards Press Release Template and Example — Ian McAllister Design Thinking 101 — Nielsen Norman Group Why Design Thinking Works — HBR Design thinking, explained — MIT The Design Sprint — GV How we use “ship small” to rapidly build new features at GitHub — Dev Community The Permutation Test: A Visual Explanation of Statistical Testing — Jared Wilber Multi-armed bandit — Optimizely The Multi-Armed Bandit Problem and Its Solutions — Lilian Weng A/B Testing — Optimizely A/B/n Testing -Optimizely Multivariate testing — Optimizely When To Do Multivariate Tests Instead of A/B/n Tests — CXL p-value — Wikipedia Situational leadership: 4 styles and qualities Real-time monitoring of Formula 1 telemetry data on Kubernetes with Grafana, Apache Kafka, and Strimzi — Paolo Patierno Set Goals with OKR — re:Work Using Prioritization Matrices to Inform UX Decisions — Nielsen Norman Group What are objectives and key results (OKRs)? — asana Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) — GitLab What metrics and KPIs do the experts use to measure UX effectiveness? — UserZoom Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for Optimization Engineering Function Performance Indicators — GitLab Being Glue — Tanya Reilly What do Staff engineers actually do? — StaffEng Performance Monitoring: RUM vs synthetic monitoring — MDN Software performance testing — Wikipedia Performance Testing vs. Load Testing vs. Stress Testing — Blazemeter Everything You Need To Know About Stress Testing Your Software — DZone Regressions Testing — Wikipedia Static Program Analysis — Wikipedia From Frontend Developer to Principal Software Engineer — Daw-Chih Liou Time management — Wikipedia Books Staff Engineer: Leadership beyond the management track — Will Larson Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works — A.G. Lafley, Roger L. Martin Tools Clinic.js autocannon — GitHub Performance API — MDN Cypress.io Testing Library Grafana Google Lighthouse K6 — GitHub This article was originally posted on . Daw-Chih’s website

Amazon

Apache

Asana

Glue

Google

Mozilla

Static Full-Text Search in Next.js with WebAssembly, Rust, and Xor Filters

Build Faster Next.js Static Sites Using MDX And Contentlayer 

Check out my website!

Nominated for 2022 - HackerNoon Contributor of the Year - Product Management

Nominated for 2022 - HackerNoon Contributor of the Year - Typescript

Nominated for 2022 - HackerNoon Contributor of the Year - Leadership

Nominated for 2022 - HackerNoon Contributor of the Year - Software Engineering

Nominated for Coding Guru of 2022

Nominated for 2022 - HackerNoon Contributor of the Year - Learning

Too Long; Didn't Read

Make resilience your competitive advantage

A Principal Software Engineer's Guide to Planning Projects Painlessly

A Principal Software Engineer's Guide to Planning Projects Painlessly

About Author

Comments

TOPICS

THIS ARTICLE WAS FEATURED IN

Related Stories

Untitled Story

A Guide to Design Thinking and Continuous Delivery from an Ex-Principal Engineer

The Noonification: Reduce Javascript: Master the Basics (1/11/2023)

The Noonification: Satoshi Might Be a Bitcoin ETF Skeptic (1/13/2024)

The Noonification: Small Puddle of Freedom (11/25/2022)

The Noonification: How to Use AI for Your B2B Marketing (11/11/2022)

A Guide to Design Thinking and Continuous Delivery from an Ex-Principal Engineer

The Noonification: Reduce Javascript: Master the Basics (1/11/2023)

The Noonification: Satoshi Might Be a Bitcoin ETF Skeptic (1/13/2024)

The Noonification: Small Puddle of Freedom (11/25/2022)

The Noonification: How to Use AI for Your B2B Marketing (11/11/2022)

Light-Mode

Classic

Newspaper

Dark-Mode

Neon Noir

Minty

HN StartUps