When friends in engineering say, “I don’t want to be a cog in the machine,” I understand where they are coming from and try to help. I give them advice around not being [boxed in, boxed in part 2]. Explore the engineering domains and projects around your own group.
You can also escape that feeling by understanding the company’s structure. Study how every division interacts for a macro view.
Let’s begin with an e-commerce business for hats. The first prototype was built by reading a book on Rails. We have a store with 3 products for sale. The Abe Lincoln stovepipe, the Indiana Jones fedora, and Sherlock Holmes’ cap.
The first engineer wrote the site. They don’t have time to balance site uptime and good user experience.
How would you structure the engineering org?
You could hire a frontend and backend engineer. Then you add a designer to iterate on a good interface. Your design team expands to user experience researchers, product designers, and copy writers. The team’s goal is to make the products accessible to customers.
“Be Sherlock Holmes for Halloween” versus “Acquire a detective deerstalker hat.” Which sentence converts better? You’ll need to experiment with an A/B test. A product manager can come in test more ideas.
Let’s add a team of frontend engineers to focus on site performance. They’ll also ensure the technology is up to date like the latest changes to React. On the backend, the engineers watch flame graphs to understand site performance.
What would you do if you resold the 3 hats from 3 different companies? You’ll need a team to work on vendor pricing and availability.
A customer visits the site, avoids ensnaring bugs, and places an order.
You’ll need to charge the customer which requires accounting and finance to verify your numbers add up. Legal verifies the contracts and disclaimers are in place. Perhaps you live in a state with a legal requirement to add warnings for hat fabrics.
Now it’s time to fulfill the order. You could use UPS or FedEx and you’ll need a way to notify customers and track the package.
If there’s an issue, you need customer support to work with the customers.
We added about 10 groups and hired people to staff each team. You’ll need a recruiting team to reach out depending which area needs more staff. As the company grows, human resources is critical to help with policies and paperwork for employment. Like sorting out W2s, immigration policies, and choosing the right health insurance for the company.
Did you remember to redesign your floor space? You’ll need an office manager to figure out the ideal configuration.
You don’t need to know what everyone’s day-to-day is. You don’t have the time. But if you look at it – everyone plays a role in this complex system. The “machine.”
We’ve touched on the following functions:
- Design
- Frontend engineering
- Backend engineering
- Legal
- Product
- Accounting/Finance
- Customer support
- Logistics
- Vendor relations
- Human resources
- Recruiting
- Office administration
This is not a comprehensive list of teams in an e-commerce company selling hats.
No matter what role you’re in, how well do you understand your team’s responsibilities? You are one person and you are part of a giant organization. Begin looking for cross-functional projects across engineering or different units. Then look at your skillsets and try to connect the dots with each sector of the company. Seek information on how the pieces fit together.
Do you see where you can improve communication? Or ‘debug’ a few processes between two departments?
If you notice you never talk to a specific department, reach out and get coffee with someone there. I promise you will learn something new. You’ll make a connection with a department that might not interact with each other. Try to understand their problems and someday you could propose a solution to help them.
And that’s how you influence the company from your sector to win together.
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