How big tech companies run projects
deep dive article on the topic: (How Big Tech Runs Tech Projects and the Curious Absence of Scrum)[https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/project-management-at-big-tech/ (opens in a new tab)]
Example: Skype (all in on scrum) vs Whatsapp (purposely ignore all heavy process) -> Whatsapp out-executed Skype and won the market.
- In the survey, 83% of engineers would advise against JIRA
- None of the big tech companies listed enforce a methodology like scrum or kanban
Plan -> Build (Iterate) -> Ship
@ Amazon, Apple, Datadog, Facebook, Google, Netflix, Shopify, Uber...
Amazon has 6-pagers for the "plan" phase.
Most go through an RFC-like phase before iterating.
Some use a Kanban-like process to work on the top priority.
Shopify calls it "GSD" (Get Sh*t Done) in 6 week cycles.
The cycle is often around 6-8 weeks, enough to ship something meaningful, but not too long to be able to see the end. Sometimes with a 2 week "cool down" period to work on other things.
They all focus on:
- Product focused environments
- Empowered and autonomous teams
- A motivated engineer easily makes multiple times the impact of a "factory worker"
- Exposure to business & metrics
The product manager is not in charge of project management. They don't write tickets/tasks. They focus on vision, strategy & partnership. Engineers carry most of the project management responsibility & create their own tasks.
Competent, autonomous people need less structure to produce reliable, high-quality output. Big Tech is able to attract, afford and hire these people.
Scrum/Jira is optimized for reporting => low trust environment
6-pager (Amazon)
- Structured as a narrative essay (no slides or bullet points)
- Clear purpose, background, problem/opportunity, solution, alternatives, risks, FAQs
- Meeting format: 20-30min of silent reading, then starts the discussion
RFCs (Uber)
- little plan before building
- capture the plan in a short document
- have a few selected people review
- send to all engineers. Let everyone comment
- have everyone follow these steps for anything non-trivial, keep this a lightweight process