Practices & Process Checklist

Fork this checklist on Google Docs

Spanning from your first on-call rotation to reviewing how information propagates from your executive team down to each engineer, there are an infinite number of practices and processes that you can implement in an organization. When you jump into a new organization or come up for air after your latest product launch, it’s helpful to have a checklist to think through how well your existing practices are working and which practices you might want to introduce next.

This checklist isn’t the set of required practices for your organization: every organization is unique. As you work through this checklist, think about your current challenges, consider how your existing processes could be improved to address them, and whether there’s a missing practice that might help.

How to Use

1. Fork this checklist on Google Docs
2. Budget an hour to work through the checklist, preferably with someone else
3. Check off the existing processes you already have.
4. Highlight in red the existing processes that aren’t working going well
5. Highlight in blue the processes you don’t have that seem particularly valuable
6. Write a proposal that suggests a couple processes to improve or introduce
7. Discuss the proposal with other organizational leaders in Engineering, Recruiting, and People organizations, identifying who should own the initiative, how you’ll evaluate success, and timing for the change
8. Now you’re done!

Tips

• While it can be tempting, you will always regret introducing new process and practice without checking in with your manager first. Ask first!
• It’s best to work through this checklist in partnership with other folks in your organization. Ideally you’d also have someone from your Recruiting and People (aka Human Resources) team involved as some of these practices are most easily adopted there. This might work well for a session at an offsite
• Process has a cost. Not having process has a cost, too. As you consider introducing new practices, think about the cost of maintaining it, not just the initial cost