The Organization Roadmap

When navigating into a organization, knowing which terrain you'll be crossing is crucial for decision making. Few points are very important when addressing which type of company you are working in.

1. Open or Closed

Deals with how information is spread around the company. Is it into a more open-style where information of every single thing is of easy access? Or is it more closed? With private Slack Channels? Documents? Informations?

2. Oral or Written

Is the information shared into a more oral manner or all docs should be written? Are decisions made by documents OR by informal meetings? How much is the informal decision making accepted or not? Do we use Design-Docs? How formal should be the Change Management process?

3. Top-down or Botton-up?

This one will define whether the company will acknowledge people for their initiatives OR for just following the guidelines. This is a crucial point where you may be seen too much "Wild West" or Lazy. For Staff+ Engineers, you should be autonomous. But careful with how your manager sees your autonomy due to the points above.

4. Deliberate or Slow Change?

AKA Startup Mentality vs Big Business Stability. Should we hustle for the low hanging fruit OR should we move into a more reliable and long-term solution?

5. Open channels or via Process Channels?

Is the company used to having DM messages to take on questions, make decisions OR is everything formal - which needs a ticket, a doc, a request or something along that way? It's worth to be careful in companies where the process is to be respected above any social interactions - since this can be seem as rude OR like "skipping the queue" In my personal belief, this is very much related to business vs startup models and the profile of engineers on each one of them. Hustling people VS people used to big companies rhythm (slow and steady). Getting information so easily from Engineers or other teams can make the rhythm go faster OR out of pace. No-good

6. Available Resources or Busy People?

Basically, you are not getting any traction OR may even be seen as annoying if you try to convince new initiatives when people are just too busy.

Papers to read https://www.researchgate.net/publication/8150380_A_Typology_of_Organisational_Cultures