On agency

A lot of the teams I’ve been a part of have been very top-down, i.e. as the engineers on the teams, you just build the thing you’re asked to build, without the opportunity to provide any meaningful input or ability to shape the direction of the product you’re building beyond the technical side of things.

Contrast that with my current company, where we take a very bottom-up approach to how we build product.

It felt foreign to me at first. You mean I’m not just an order taker?

New teams at a bottom-up org tend to take a little longer start firing on all cylinders because they inherently don’t have the initial jump start they’d be getting from a top-down org.

These slow starts could be for any number of reasons. Usually a few things are at play, maybe a lack of domain expertise, or a lack of deprequired to be impactful right out of the gate.

The lifeblood of a bottom-up org (any org really) is data and customer conversations. A top-down org tends to abstract this away from the teams, though.

I could never go back to a top-down org.