The game only works when all teams play by the rules. On the flip side, if you are the final deciding senior executive - it is also bad form to make a call when this step-by-step escalation is not followed. Since healthy organizations push decision-making down through the org, unfortunately deadlocks need to be resolved by escalating up the chart one step at a time. Force Recursive Traversal: It is bad form to blindside the management chain in a different org, or even in your own org, by going straight to the senior-most executive and skipping several layers of managers along the way.Frequently, teams on different sides of an impasse are asked to write their own alternatives to faithfully and fully represent options - no shading!
This helps the final call maker weigh options easily and clearly. In this case, Setting, People and Alternatives are clearly documented but Decisions and Explanations are left blank until the impasse gets resolved. While technically about decisions, it turns out to be just as helpful with escalations - our standard practice is to ship what we call a SPA doc. Write SPA Docs: Originally created and popularized by everyone’s friend and advisor Gokul Rajaram, the Square SPADE framework is now templatized and available everywhere.Coach your teams to double-check that they are at an impasse that cannot be resolved before they escalate. Coach your teams to have respectful, polite but direct conversations with partner teams about the need to escalate and a collaborative process by which to escalate. Escalate Respectfully and Openly: Even if you have the right permission structure, the act of deciding to escalate can be fraught with anxiety about looming conflict.Embracing this supposedly contrarian position helps. Create the right permission structure: Leaders must vocally create the permission structure - since the default behaviors are rooted in deep-seated human tendencies, alterations to behaviors require vocal advocacy from senior leadership - it’s OK, it’s healthy, you’re not doing anything wrong, you should be doing this more often.If you find yourself in a similar situation, here are a few best practices to keep in mind: Square has gotten better at this over the years but we are still working at it, mainly by being vocal as a senior leadership team to the rest of our teams and by continuing to iterate on our planning processes. To express this visually for those such inclined: different General Managers), the higher the difficulty level. Of course, the more teams we add and the more organizational distance we add (e.g. In my years at Square, we’ve found this to be somewhat difficult nearly 100% of the times even in the simplest of cases - even when exactly 2 teams are involved and both directly report up to me. While the 2 environments have several challenges in common, larger companies with hundreds of teams find themselves continually challenged to ship work that crosses team boundaries - that is, projects that require 2 or more teams to problem-solve together, design together, coordinate priorities and timelines. It is hard in small startups but also, in different ways, in fast-growing larger companies with hundreds of semi-autonomous teams with their own roadmaps.
#That escalated quickly software
They didn’t mean anything negative to us, we would just write up an escalation to various teams and leads and explain tradeoffs”.īuilding and shipping software with predictability and velocity is hard. Escalations were everywhere at Amazon and just a way of life.
What I heard, instead, was something I had felt but never been able to articulate with clarity - he said, “The thing that surprises me most is how little we escalate around here. I expected a well-worn answer about Amazon’s frugality, or its ingrained long-term orientation, or its relentless focus on working backwards from the customer. Like all San Francisco tech types, I retain a healthy level of obsession with the Amazon way and am always looking to learn from those with hard-won tribal knowledge. After the basic pleasantries were concluded, I sat across from the seasoned Amazon Eng leader and asked him one of my favorite questions - “After 3 months at Square, what have you found to be most surprising about how we work compared to Amazon?”.
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