Philosophies On Tech Leadership

I believe in freedom with responsibility. With freedom you get ownership where developers can own the outcome of whatever they are doing.

This is why you should always ask "why" we are doing something, then "what" we are achieving, and leave the "how" to whomever do the actual work.

Enforcong rules can help in assuring technical alignment, And sure, this is a good thing. But it also restrict creativity. One should always strive to have as few rules as you can get away with while also having a consistent delivery, maintenance burden, and keeping people innovative.

I believe that the platform and process should offer as few constraints as possible while enforcing enough guardrails to ensure that good ideas get traction and bad ideas are left out.

Granted, taking this too far can place you in the precarious situation where you are running Zig, Java and Python, and four different frontend frameworks, and only god knows how many tools around cicd. This is not scalable and should obviously be avoided.

That is where the process should be there to help you. Ensure that roadmaps and what you are going to do is a collaborative process where the team can way in. Freedom does not mean that you can blindly build and deploy whatever you like however you like. Ideas require buy in. If someone wants to introduce Rust in your codebase that is going to be a tough sell if you are running a Java shop. However, if enough compelling arguments are presented and the alternatives are worse, the answer has to be yes. How can you say no without first listening to the pitch? What is important is that you have a platform ( a refinement or planning) where you can have those discussions.

It as in sutuations like these where you can present your tech philosophy and align on details without compromising on innovation.