Friday, 11 April 2025

Lessons from Toyota: How 'True North' Can Transform Your Engineering Team

 In the realm of engineering, achieving excellence requires more than just technical proficiency; it demands a clear and unwavering vision. One of the most compelling guiding principles in this context is Toyota's concept of "True North." Rooted in the Toyota Production System (TPS), True North serves as an idealistic benchmark, directing organisations towards perfection in quality, efficiency, and employee satisfaction. By understanding and implementing this philosophy, engineering teams can undergo transformative improvements.

Understanding True North

True North represents an organisation's ultimate objectives - its mission and the ethical standards it strives to uphold. Within Toyota, this concept emphasises delivering unparalleled value to customers, fostering continuous improvement, and respecting every team member's contribution. It acts as a compass, ensuring that all actions and decisions align with the company's core values and long-term goals.

Applying True North to Engineering Teams

1. Customer-Centric Development

Adopting a True North perspective encourages engineering teams to prioritise customer needs. This involves developing products and solutions that not only meet but exceed customer expectations, ensuring reliability, usability, and value.

2. Commitment to Continuous Improvement

True North fosters a culture where teams consistently seek ways to enhance processes and outcomes. This commitment to Kaizen, or continuous improvement, leads to incremental advancements that collectively result in significant performance gains over time.

3. Respect for Team Members

Central to the True North philosophy is the respect for people. By recognising and valuing each team member's input, organisations cultivate an environment of collaboration and innovation. This respect translates into higher morale and a shared commitment to organisational goals.

4. Elimination of Waste

Engineering teams guided by True North are vigilant in identifying and eliminating waste—be it time, resources, or effort. This focus ensures that all activities add value, leading to more efficient operations and better resource utilisation.

Transformative Benefits of Embracing True North

1. Enhanced Product Quality

By aligning with True North principles, teams are better equipped to produce high-quality products that resonate with customer needs, thereby strengthening brand reputation and customer loyalty.

2. Increased Operational Efficiency

The continuous pursuit of improvement and waste reduction leads to streamlined processes, reducing costs and accelerating project timelines.

3. Empowered and Engaged Teams

A culture that respects and values contributions fosters employee engagement, leading to higher job satisfaction and retention rates.

4. Sustainable Growth

With a clear vision and committed workforce, organisations are well-positioned for sustainable growth, adapting seamlessly to market changes and technological advancements.

Incorporating Toyota's True North philosophy into engineering practices offers a pathway to excellence. By steadfastly focusing on customer value, continuous improvement, and respect for individuals, teams can transform their operations, achieving remarkable outcomes that benefit both the organisation and its customers.

Wednesday, 9 April 2025

How to Write a Strategy Document as an Engineering Manager

 Engineering managers are often expected to provide clarity amid chaos. You may have a team delivering features at full speed, but without a coherent strategy, progress can feel reactive rather than intentional.

A strategy document is your tool to articulate a clear direction, align stakeholders, and drive meaningful engineering outcomes. Yet, many strategy docs end up as vague mission statements or lists of aspirational goals with no tangible execution plan.

Let’s fix that.

This article will walk through how to write a practical engineering strategy document, covering both the broad approach and specific techniques to make your strategy actionable. Then, we’ll take five strategies and extrapolate them into a cohesive engineering vision.


What Makes a Good Strategy Document?

A great strategy document is:

Clear: It should be easy to understand, even for someone outside your team.
Actionable: It should guide decision-making, not just inspire.
Opinionated: It should make choices, not just list options.
Connected to Business Goals: Engineering for engineering’s sake is wasteful. A strong strategy should be tied to real company objectives.

A bad strategy document, on the other hand, is:

Overly generic – "We strive for engineering excellence." (What does that mean?)
Disconnected from reality – "We will ship everything on time, with zero bugs." (Good luck.)
Not actionable – "We prioritise innovation." (And how do you do that, exactly?)


How to Structure Your Strategy Document

1. Start With Context: Why Does This Strategy Exist?

Set the scene. Why are you writing this? What’s happening in your organisation or industry that makes this strategy necessary?

Example:
"Our engineering team has doubled in the past year. However, we lack clear decision-making processes, leading to duplicated efforts and inconsistencies across teams. This strategy aims to provide structure while keeping our autonomy and velocity intact."

2. Define Your Objectives: What Are You Trying to Achieve?

List 3–5 high-level goals that this strategy should support. These should align with business priorities.

Example objectives:

  • Improve system reliability as we scale.
  • Reduce time-to-market for new features.
  • Make hiring and onboarding more efficient.
  • Strengthen technical decision-making and architectural consistency.

3. The Strategy: How Will You Achieve These Goals?

This is the meat of your document. A strategy isn’t just a goal; it’s a plan of action. It should be specific enough that engineers and leaders can make decisions based on it.

Let’s break down five key strategies that an engineering team might adopt.


Five Key Engineering Strategies

1. Invest in Developer Experience to Improve Velocity

The Problem: Slow builds, cumbersome code reviews, and inefficient tooling slow down the entire team.

The Strategy:

  • Standardise on fast, reproducible development environments.
  • Reduce friction in CI/CD pipelines.
  • Automate common tasks to eliminate toil.
  • Prioritise documentation and knowledge sharing.

Expected Impact: Engineers spend less time on setup and more time delivering value.


2. Shift Left on Reliability

The Problem: Engineering teams often treat reliability as an afterthought, leading to outages and firefighting.

The Strategy:

  • Establish SLIs/SLOs and hold teams accountable for reliability.
  • Introduce chaos engineering and failure testing.
  • Improve observability—every service should be easy to monitor and debug.
  • Treat incidents as learning opportunities with blameless post-mortems.

Expected Impact: Fewer late-night PagerDuty alerts, happier engineers, and more trust in the platform.


3. Drive Architectural Consistency Without Centralised Control

The Problem: As teams scale, engineering can become fragmented, leading to inconsistent patterns, duplicated efforts, and technical debt.

The Strategy:

  • Adopt paved paths—recommended frameworks, libraries, and patterns that teams can opt into.
  • Establish an architecture review forum, not to impose control but to provide guidance and shared knowledge.
  • Build self-serve infrastructure to prevent teams from reinventing the wheel.

Expected Impact: Faster development, fewer architectural regrets, and a culture of cohesion without bureaucracy.


4. Make Hiring and Onboarding a First-Class Engineering Concern

The Problem: Hiring is often treated as a separate HR function, and onboarding is frequently an afterthought. The result? Slow growth and high churn.

The Strategy:

  • Involve senior engineers in defining hiring criteria and interview processes.
  • Treat onboarding as part of the engineering roadmap—new hires should be productive in weeks, not months.
  • Introduce mentorship programmes to support new engineers.

Expected Impact: Stronger hiring pipelines, lower attrition, and teams that scale more effectively.


5. Encourage a Culture of Technical Leadership at All Levels

The Problem: Too much decision-making bottlenecks at the senior engineering level, while mid-level engineers lack the support to grow into leadership roles.

The Strategy:

  • Establish a clear career progression framework that rewards technical leadership.
  • Rotate engineers through tech lead roles on projects.
  • Provide structured opportunities for knowledge sharing—internal talks, RFCs, and design reviews.

Expected Impact: A more empowered engineering team, reducing dependencies on a handful of senior engineers.


From Strategies to Vision: Bringing It All Together

A strategy document should be specific, but it should also contribute to a broader vision for engineering.

If we extrapolate the five strategies above, we arrive at this vision statement:

"Our engineering team is built for scale and velocity. We invest in developer experience and reliability as first-class priorities. We balance autonomy with consistency through paved paths and shared architectural guidance. Hiring and onboarding are treated as engineering problems, not just HR concerns. And most importantly, we foster a culture where technical leadership happens at all levels, enabling us to build resilient, high-impact software at speed."

A strong engineering vision ensures that day-to-day decisions align with long-term priorities.


Final Thoughts

A strategy document isn’t just something you write and forget—it’s a living document that should be reviewed, challenged, and iterated as your organisation evolves.

If you’re an engineering manager and haven’t written one yet, start small. Even a one-page draft strategy can clarify direction and align your team.

And remember: Good strategy is about making choices. A bad strategy tries to be everything at once. A great strategy is focused, opinionated, and actionable.

What strategies have worked for you in shaping an engineering organisation? Let’s discuss in the comments. #EngineeringLeadership #Strategy #ScalingTeams

Friday, 4 April 2025

The Rise of Deno 2.0: Why It Matters for JavaScript Developers in 2025

In October 2024, Deno 2.0 was officially released, marking a significant milestone in the evolution of JavaScript runtimes. Designed to address the complexities and limitations of its predecessors, Deno 2.0 offers a modern, secure, and efficient environment for JavaScript and TypeScript development. As we progress through 2025, understanding the advancements introduced in Deno 2.0 is crucial for developers aiming to leverage its capabilities.

Key Features and Enhancements in Deno 2.0

1. Enhanced Node.js Compatibility

Deno 2.0 substantially improves compatibility with Node.js, enabling developers to utilise a vast array of existing npm modules seamlessly. This enhancement simplifies the migration process for projects transitioning from Node.js to Deno, allowing for a more versatile development experience.

2. Integration with Modern Frameworks

The runtime's compatibility extends to popular JavaScript frameworks such as Next.js, Astro, and Remix. This integration facilitates the adoption of Deno in contemporary web development projects, offering developers the flexibility to choose the best tools for their specific needs.

3. Performance Improvements

Deno 2.0 introduces various performance optimisations, including faster package installations and build processes. These enhancements contribute to a more efficient development workflow, reducing the time required for setup and execution.

4. Security Enhancements

Building upon its secure-by-default philosophy, Deno 2.0 offers enhanced security features that provide developers with greater control over application permissions and access, reinforcing the runtime's commitment to safe code execution.

5. Simplified Dependency Management

The introduction of a more concise lockfile format in Deno 2.0 minimises diffs when updating dependencies and ensures reproducible builds. This improvement streamlines the management of project dependencies, enhancing consistency across development environments.

Why Deno 2.0 Matters for JavaScript Developers in 2025

1. Modern Development Practices

Deno 2.0 aligns with contemporary development practices by offering built-in TypeScript support, a secure execution environment, and compatibility with modern frameworks. These features enable developers to adopt current methodologies without relying on additional tools or configurations.

2. Streamlined Migration from Node.js

The enhanced Node.js compatibility in Deno 2.0 simplifies the migration process for existing projects. Developers can transition to Deno without extensive rewrites, preserving investments in existing codebases while benefiting from Deno's modern features.

3. Improved Developer Experience

Performance optimisations and simplified dependency management contribute to a smoother development experience. Faster build times and efficient package management allow developers to focus more on coding and less on configuration and setup.

4. Future-Proofing Applications

As the JavaScript ecosystem continues to evolve, adopting Deno 2.0 positions developers to leverage upcoming advancements in the runtime. Its modern architecture and active development community ensure that Deno remains at the forefront of JavaScript runtime innovation.

In conclusion, Deno 2.0 represents a significant advancement in JavaScript runtimes, offering features and improvements that address the needs of modern developers. Its focus on security, performance, and compatibility makes it a compelling choice for JavaScript development in 2025 and beyond.

Lessons from Toyota: How 'True North' Can Transform Your Engineering Team

 In the realm of engineering, achieving excellence requires more than just technical proficiency; it demands a clear and unwavering vision. ...