The Staff Engineer's Path

Chapter 6. Why Have We Stopped?

As the project’s driver, you’re responsible for getting everyone safely to the destination. But there are a lot of reasons your journey might stop early. You could run into roadblocks: accidents, toll booths, or a country road full of sheep. You might find that you’ve lost your map, or that the various people in the car disagree about where you’re going. Or you might just realize you should be going somewhere else.

The Project Isn’t Moving—Should It Be?

In Chapter 5, we talked about starting projects. Now it’s time to look at ways they can halt. We’ll start with two kinds of temporary stops you might encounter when something’s going wrong: getting blocked by something, and getting lost.

Then we’ll look at ways you might intentionally stop the journey. Sometimes this means declaring victory too soon, but it’s also sometimes just time for the journey to end, whether it’s reached its destination or not.

This is a good opportunity to note that, as a leader in your organization, you can help projects that you’re not leading too. Sometimes the best use of your time will be to set aside what you were doing and use pushes, nudges, and small steps (and, OK, sometimes major escalations) to get a stalled project moving again. As Will Larson says, this small investment of time can have a huge impact:

A surprising number of projects are one small change away from succeeding, one quick modification away from unlocking a new opportunity, or one conversation ...