| I've done a startup, a couple of midsize companies (~4k engineers), and AWS. Just my 2c, a lot of the advice I'm seeing here applies more to the midsize companies than at least my corner of AWS. In my Amazon experience: * Some very high level project requirements would come from above (e.g. after this date, internal technology X is being deprecated, so you should have a really good reason to put out a project with X). * Otherwise, decisions were mostly made at a low level, documented, debated with the wider team for an hour, then implemented. This was a little more structured than at the startup, but most of it was that documentation and debate happened before implementation, rather than after implementation at the startup. * Project managers were somewhat active with the team, but a lot of the features we worked on came from the engineers watching what was used, forum requests, or customer requests through other channels (e.g. conferences). * There was a focus on getting products out quickly, but tech debt/tests/reliability was a much bigger focus than anywhere else I've been. * The team was fairly small, and encouraged to make heavy use of other team's internal tooling/native AWS tools for anything that didn't really need to be custom. Interactions with those teams was pretty straightforward and mostly supportive- "We're using your service to do Y, and would like to do Z too, but that doesn't seem possible without some tweaks to your API/service, is that something you can put in the backlog to investigate?" * An individual team could be quick to change, but the organization as a whole has a lot of cultural momentum in the way things are done, and it's not clear who to talk to to make recommendations. For example, at the startup, I could go to the CEO and express concerns about the newly restrictive information security policy. At Amazon, I'm probably not going to email Jeff Bezos and suggest six-pagers be made available in advance of meetings. * Transferring teams in Amazon is mostly extremely easy * Conversely, Conway's law applies hard in AWS- it didn't seem straightforward to offer products or features that weren't obviously under one team's purview without forming a new team. |