Hi,
So, you want to build an IDP and drive platform engineering in your organization. But how do you get your managers on board? It might help you to understand in more detail how your managers prioritize, how they think, and how to get their attention. I’ve been in a C-Level role for over a decade now, and I’ve seen these circles come and go. So, hopefully, I can help you understand the manager “species” a little better. Let’s go.
Imagine you’re a manager (maybe you are already, or maybe you want to be!). Do you care about platform engineering? Not really. But believing in the good in humanity — which isn’t trivial these days — you care about things roughly in this order: people, process, profit. You want to map anything that comes up against these three things. What’s important to understand is that the level at which you’re thinking about these three things depends on your rank. And so, in order to understand what would make managers care about platform engineering, it’s important to understand how the focus of managers across different ranks is actually set.
Focus is set in waves. There’s a strategy phase to prepare things, and then there’s an execution phase to execute. You have essentially two options: you find a way to tie platform engineering into ongoing execution priorities, OR you play the long game and try to influence the strategy process. There is no other way, you’ll just waste time trying…
Let’s next understand how the process works end to end:
Everything starts with C-level managers. They’re the ones who gather information from the market and their direct reports. They spend time sorting through this information and identifying what will have the biggest shareholder value impact, within the confinements of the law and a certain set of values. Then you have the CIO and CTO, who can do many things in any given time frame, but have limited resources. So, during their strategy process, they are force-ranking hard. If you want to position something, the middle managers who are C-Level direct reports have to make a simple case for building a platform engineering. C-Levels care about the impact on something, AND they must be able to easily understand and measure things. Best case, you can reconfirm a suspicion the manager has already. For instance, let’s say the CTO of a traditional bank gets questions from the CEO about why startup ABC is shipping so many cool features so fast. This CTO will care about time to market, so your case has to align directly with this.
After assessing their organization’s capacities, the C-Level will cut their priority list at some point. What doesn’t make it on this list has very little chance to go anywhere. But interesting a C-Level in changing their priorities on the fly is hard. They’ve communicated their list to other C-Levels and the board. And they absolutely hate setting priorities the wrong way. It’s also simply not best practice to change your strategy every ten days. You should prioritize well and execute thoroughly. So, in other words, if your initiative doesn’t fit into this force ranking, you have little chance.
These priorities are now handed over to middle managers. They get these objectives, and at this point, they stop thinking about most other things. This is because they’ll be benchmarked by how fast and effectively they can execute. So, you still have a chance of positioning your case, but only if you can help these middle managers shine in their next review. If you can give them ammunition by saying, “we analyzed your guidance and have concluded that the fastest way to increase feature delivery is platform engineering,” you have a chance even after the strategy process has finished.
I hope this helped. If you want, you can join me on November 9th, I will be giving a class on how to “hack your manager.” In general, it’s important to remember that we’re talking about normal human beings. They care about the opinions of others, they want to shine, and first and foremost, they want to keep their jobs and provide for their families.
I wish all of us strength to remember that we have the decision to stay high even if they go low. Every little action we do can make the world a better place.
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Cheers,
Kaspar
