Staff SWE: dealing with ambiguity

This is a really relevant article that I have followed over the years but I never documented it. The author does a good job of capturing the most important ideas. Only thing I can add is that for the decision making framework I have settled on RAPID framework – https://www.bain.com/insights/rapid-decision-making/

Playbook for handling a highly ambiguous problem/project.

1. map out the state of play
   • Talk to involved teams to understand what the problems at hand are, and rough sketches of what the solution might look like.
   • Debug the gaps in cross-functional awareness and partnership that are making this difficult to resolve.
   • Identify who the key stakeholders are, and also the potential executive sponsors for this work.
2. Develop potential options to solve the state of play
   • Cluster the potential approaches and develop a clear vocabulary for the clusters and general properties of each approach.
   • Develop the core tradeoffs to be made in the various approaches. Be very specific to get agreement across stakeholders who may not know all the details/implications.
   • Talk to folks solving similar problems at other companies. It’s one thing for you to say that you want to run a wholly isolated instance of your product per region, but it’s something else entirely to say that Amazon used to do so. As you gather more of this data, you can benchmark against how similar companies approached this issue.
3. Drive a decision (use RAPIDd framework)
   • Determine who has the authority to enforce the decision.
   • Document a decision making process and ensure stakeholders are aware of that process. Eventually, you will lean on the authorities to hold folks to the process, but they’ll only do that if you’ve already mostly gotten folks aligned.
   • Follow that process to its end. Slow down as necessary to bring people along, but do promptly escalate on anyone who withholds their consent from the process
   • Align on the criteria to reopen this decision. One way that solutions to ambiguous problems die is that the debates are immediately reopened for litigation after the decision is made, and you should strive to prevent that. Generally a reasonable proposal is “material, new information or six months from now”

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Despite following this, things can fail. The usual reasons when that can happen are 2 fold:

1. Trying to solve the problem too early.
2. Not having an executive sponsor.