Executing large controversial ideas
Brilliant ideas are often controversial – if they were not, they would be no brainers and someone would have likely already executed it. They can be controversial for different reasons – maybe they require a significant investment upfront (and your company doesn’t have such resources) or maybe because one team gets significantly and negatively impacted.
Executing such ideas is a critical responsibility of senior engineers/managers. One way that worked well in my case has been to do the following:
- Write a one pager about the problem and proposal – this is an actual one page long document. It is a very crisp document that targets a narrow audience – namely the stakeholders that already have context on the domain.
- Start socializing the idea with the stakeholders and invite them to help drive this proposal instead of just approving it. People are more likely to be supportive and push forward if they feel partially responsible for it
- Be patient – this is the most important point of this document, controversial ideas need time to be accepted. You can either wait for the circumstances to be favorable (e.g. if your proposal is to prevent a type of outage and such outage happened) or make them a reality (e.g. if the proposal requires too much work, you can reduce the amount of work by chipping at the mountain with prep work)
This is something that I’ve done many times during my career at Google or even now at Databricks. Once in a while you have to push forward a controversial proposal in a timely manner and make hard calls (e.g. through exec escalations), but I’ve personally found waiting for the right time a better experience – execution in this case has been always more efficient.