Autonomy and alignment

Autonomy and alignment is the best way to scale engineering. Alignment focuses teams on the outcomes, not the approach. When this is paired with autonomy, those with the most context on a problem are set up to solve it. This results in better solutions, less reliance on individuals and leads to more efficient and empowered teams.

Clear expectations and accountability are key to achieving alignment, and care needs to be taken to avoid autonomous anarchy. Like in horizontally scalable systems, an engineering organisation successfully built on autonomy and alignment can be scaled by simply adding great teams. Those engineers are also more likely to stick around because they have everything they need to do what they do best.