Topic Digest: Position Sizing & Decision Making 101
Engineering leaders make hundreds of these decisions every day. That amounts to thousands upon thousands of bets.
As an engineering leader, when you kick off a new project, you have to take a step back and think about the risks involved and the resources available.
Before squads are formed, and individuals allocated to project teams, you have to determine the amount of work they should take on. This is known as position sizing.
📐 Position Sizing: The process of determining the appropriate amount of work for a team or individual to take on in a project or a sprint.
When you use position sizing as part of your game plan, you're essentially being smart about the chances you're willing to take and optimizing the heck out of everything you've got at your fingertips. 👉 This approach helps you make better decisions.
When discussing the strategic decisions they have to make, eng leaders throw around terms like "probabilities," "risk," and "reward." It's all about weighing the odds and deciding what's worth going for.
Every decision you make is like a high-stakes bet.
For example, every time you promote a team member, you’re making a bet on how well they’ll perform in a new role.
When you're assessing a potential candidate for a new position, you'll naturally take stock of their skills and what they can bring to the table. But you'll also need to think about what could potentially go sideways.
Some questions you should ask yourself:
Are they ready for their new responsibilities?
Are they already critical in their current role?
Will moving them to a new role make other parts of your organization suffer?
Engineering leaders make hundreds of these decisions every day. That amounts to thousands upon thousands of bets.
But thinking about position sizing can help eng leaders can make informed decisions about the risks they are willing to take and optimize their use of available resources.
We recommend taking this approach when thinking about product, initiatives, and technology.
Later this week we’re gonna go into some practical decision-making frameworks and how you can use them to help your teams!
See you then!
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Position Sizing is a topic explored on this episode of Developing Leadership.
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