Realistic Product Roadmaps and Other Lies | Best Egg’s Johnny Ray Austin
Plus, generative AI is not going to build your engineering team for you and tracking long running goals.
When we first saw the talk titled “Space Aliens Are Among Us, Your Product Roadmap is Realistic and Other Lies you Believe,” we knew we had to sit down with Best Egg’s Johnny Ray Austin at LeadingEng SF last year.
Johnny joined me to discuss how engineering leaders can navigate unrealistic expectations and pressures, drawing from his experiences and relating product roadmaps to the less-than-tangible UFO disclosure we’ve seen in recent years. The conversation explores the pressures engineering leaders face, how to align product roadmaps realistically, and how to manage ambiguity within teams.
By aligning engineering goals with business objectives and building a transparent, high-performing engineering culture, you can give your teams the context they need to drive focus and concentration toward the right outcomes.
“We talk a lot about velocity and just moving quickly, and I think a lot of teams get caught up in moving quickly that they forget that they need to have a direction as well.
They're on the treadmill of doom, essentially. Moving real fast, looking real busy, but ultimately not getting to the outcomes they want. You can easily burn out a team for a year and accomplish absolutely nothing.”
Episode Highlights:
1:36 Where Johnny came up with the talk title "Space Aliens Are Among Us"
4:15 Advice for engineering leaders struggling with roadmap realism
6:44 Cutting through the noise to find the metrics that matter
11:41 How do teams know if they're moving fast in the right direction?
14:58 How do you handle teams that are getting the wrong input?
20:32 Lies we tell ourselves that we need to get past
28:32 What it’s like to create a new unit inside a company
33:53 Identifying and dealing with ambiguity on your teams
40:45 Johnny’s Thoughts on AI
The Download
The Download is engineering leadership content we’re reading, watching, and attending that we think you might find valuable.
1. Generative AI is not going to build your engineering team for you
Honeycomb.io CTO Charity Majors is a fantastic writer, and her newest article on Stack Overflow is a great takedown of some of the sentiments we’re seeing about Gen AI’s role in software teams.
Charity argues that creating code has always been the easiest part of an engineer’s job, and you cannot expect AI tooling to replace junior or intermediate-level devs. You need people who can understand, maintain, and improve your codebases, not just questionable chunks of code generated from ChatGPT or Copilot.
Read: Generative AI is not going to build your engineering team for you
AI is not coming to solve all our problems and write all our code for us—and even if it was, it wouldn’t matter. Writing code is but a sliver of what professional software engineers do, and arguably the easiest part…
Great teams are how great engineers get made. Nobody knows this better than engineers and EMs. It’s time for us to make the case, and make it happen.
2. Deltas to the Global Maxima
Over-indexing on an internal career track can be detrimental to the overall growth of your direct reports, and
is back with another great post about helping your staff identify their “global maxima.”By focusing on someone’s holistic career growth and goals, you can help your team members create plans to develop the necessary skills and experiences to reach them. You need to take time to understand people’s aspirations and help them reduce the gap between their current roles and ambitions, even if it means supporting moves to other companies down the road.
Complimentary Gartner Guide to Software Engineering Intelligence Platforms (Sponsor)
Engineering teams are rapidly adopting Software Engineering Intelligence (SEI) Platforms to improve engineering team productivity and value delivery. According to Gartner’s recent Market Guide, the use of SEI platforms by engineering organizations will rise to 50% by 2027, compared to 5% in 2024.
Get ahead of the curve, and learn how you can unlock the transformative potential of SEI platforms by leveraging key features like:
Extensive data from DevOps tools for critical metrics and insights.
Customizable dashboards that highlight pivotal trends and inform strategic decisions.
Insights into key performance indicators that showcase your team's achievements.
3. How to track long-running goals
Initiatives that span months or years can become unwieldy and unmanageable without the proper systems or scoping in place.
breaks down her system that keeps long-running initiatives in line with the rest of her work weeks, and how she organizes a planner to keep everything in check.
4. Software Engineering Intelligence: Exposed & In Action
Following our Labs episode last week covering Everything You Need to Know About Software Engineering Intelligence, LinearB just released their workshop Software Engineering Intelligence: Exposed & In Action.
If you want to take a deeper, hands-on dive into how you can leverage SEI Platforms to improve every aspect of your SDLC, we highly recommend watching this session with LinearB co-founders Dan Lines and Ori Keren.
A great collection of articles this time. I’m going to listen to that podcast, can’t skip it with this title 😂
Thanks so much for the mention, really appreciate it!