During my last compensation review, one identified growth area was to expand my impact outside my team and applications. So I started looking for cross-cutting problems, one of which was the lack of a user-based feature flagging solution.
But I couldn’t just go and build the system I wanted since none would buy into my solution. A unilateral decision doesn’t work at Netflix due to our culture of freedom and responsibility. Therefore, most of the cross-cutting problems are solved via working groups, a group of interested people who work together to define needs, recommend a solution, and, possibly, implement the solution.
So I kicked off a working group on feature flags last week. Even though I have seen firsthand how the groups worked together to transition our servers to containers, and to introduce GraphQL, this time is my first attempt at running a working group. It will be a challenging and teaching experience. But I will get through it.
Photo by Perry Grone on Unsplash
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This article gave me a perspective on how to identify cross-cutting problems. A sequel to this article, Technical Research and Preparation, also suggests a possible path forward.
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