Hey!

Welcome back to another week of musings.

I hope you had a great weekend! Baseball's Spring Training has started, and I can already feel the weather changing.

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Things I enjoyed in the past week

• Reading about the CloudFlare outage that happened on Feb 20th. Always insightful to read other companies' incident write-ups.
• I recently discovered that Will Larson wrote "Crafting Engineering Strategy", which I was sort of aware of from his blog posts, but didn't know the book had come out.

Over the last few weeks, I've been thinking not only about high agency people but also about how hard (or easy) it is to work with corporate inertia.

I've met both sides of people, meaning I've met people trying to work to change the culture, to introduce new things, or move things from different places into new processes. I've also met people who work with the culture and manage to drive its inertia towards something they see as the organization's future.

I recently came across a project trying to optimize compute resources from one region to another, but the project has been bouncing around because directors and senior directors ask if the budget has been approved, if all stakeholders are willing to put in the effort, if we're using the new migration tool or not, etc.

People championing the effort get discouraged fast, but we still want to do it. It's one of those projects that cannot start without leadership support, so we need to provide clarity to them on why we want to do this and what the business outcome is.

Sometimes we have to coach people through these setbacks, as they're not "blockers", but rather things we need to work through. Nobody is actively blocking you; everyone is looking for evidence in case someone eventually comes back asking, 'Why did we do the X or Y project?'

What I would say is that I haven't found someone who has high agency across the board; only with certain topics, and let the others "go through" or just acknowledge it's their area of interest. As usual, learn to pick your battles. Which is hard when you think you can solve everything.

Other times, I've found people understand why we want to do it, but are afraid to cross the line. In those cases, I've had to use authority to stop supporting a tool or simply let go of an old tool.

Your turn!

Have you managed to work through corporate inertia? What are your strategies? Any tips you care to share? Let me know your thoughts by replying to this email!

Happy coding!