A CTO setting engineering strategy must intentionally align team structure with the company's unique needs, business values, and size. Values prioritized include accountability, defined as ownership with measurable impact, and learning and growth to prevent stagnation. Autonomy remains important but should evolve into accountable ownership of outcomes. Engineering teams must balance enterprise-grade scalability with delivering delightful user experiences. Experience from high-growth consumer platforms informs approaches to product and platform engineering. Organizational diligence is necessary to ensure value alignment before defining structures, and leaders should enable autonomy while holding teams responsible for commitments.
Alexander: I'm Michelle, VP of Engineering at Fanatics. I lead a team that's owning our single sign-on, auth, user login experience, the Fanatics shared cache across our systems, as well as a newly launched fan app being the center for sports fandom. I've got enterprise-grade systems that need to scale, and I'm trying to build out a delightful user experience at the same time.
Today, I'm not talking to you as the VP of Engineering at Fanatics, I'm talking to you as CTO Michelle, who's leading a hypothetical company and who's going to set out their engineering organization strategy. I told you it needs to be intentional. You need to bring to the table what are your unique needs, business values, and size of your company.
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