Today, I’d like to talk about common mistakes leaders make. Let’s see if you can spot the pattern:
- Engineering is shipping too many bugs, so you bring in a QA team that reviews everything before it goes out to production.
- There has been a history of making poor architectural decisions, so you put in place an architecture review.
- The team keeps shipping completely unusable UIs, so you add a designer review step before anything can ship to production.
- The team keeps having cost overruns in AWS, so you have a central team that controls all infrastructure code.
- People are doing a shitty job with code reviews, so you add a group of the most senior people who are the only people able to merge PRs, and they review everything before it goes out.
As a leader, you are a designer. Many times you’ll face organizational challenges that will require you to design solutions. The name for what you’re doing in all of these examples is adding “process gates”. (If this was a TV show, I’d have scary music play every time you read the word “process gates”)