One of the things I love about our engineering culture is that there is a high degree of individual ownership. Most of our engineers are full stack and are expected to be the main drivers of getting initiatives that they own shipped to our customers. Sometimes this responsibility can be overwhelming and we might forget to make sure some aspect of the initiative has been executed properly. I made this checklist to help initiative owners understand what’s expected of them when they lead an initiative and even what exceeding those expectations might look like.

Meeting Expectations

Here is a non-exhaustive list of questions you should be asking yourself to help ensure you are meeting expectations as an initiative owner:

1. Planning
   1. Do we need an RFC (Request For Comment)?
   2. Has an epic been created?
   3. Have the work items been broken down into stories and estimated?
   4. Have we tried to break up the work so that at least 2 people have a solid understanding of the problem and solution?
   5. Have we reached out to the appropriate stakeholders (e.g. Product, Marketing, Customer Support, Finance, Legal) to gather ideas, context, and feedback?
   6. Are draft PRs being created as soon as possible so that there is transparency and we can course-correct early if necessary?
   7. Should the feature be behind an experiment or feature flag?
   8. Are there existing experiments that we need to exclude?
   9. Are we making sure that we’re not adding too much logic to the client instead of the backend?
   10. Have we thought about how the solution will scale? For example, do we need certain indexes or rate-limiting?
2. Testing
   1. Have unit tests, integration tests, and/or end-to-end tests been added?
   2. Has the author described what they’ve done to test the changes in the PR?
   3. Have we had the author and main reviewer test the feature locally?
   4. Does the feature require manual testing and if so, are those manual test cases ready to be executed?
   5. Have the necessary pieces been put in place so that we can test in staging and/or production?
3. Monitoring
   1. Have we added enough logging so that we can understand what’s happening?
   2. Are we capturing system metrics that we can analyze and use with alerting?
   3. Have alerts been set up so that we can know when the system is not behaving in a way we expect?
   4. Do we need a dashboard to centralize system metrics and information?
   5. Have we added the necessary eventing so that we can monitor performance from a product perspective?
4. Presentation
   1. Have you presented the initiative?
   2. Did you clearly explain the “why” before getting into the “how”?
   3. Are you able to efficiently transfer knowledge about the system to other team members through discussion and documentation?

Exceeding Expectations

Here is a non-exhaustive list of questions that may be asked to determine if you’ve exceeded expectations while leading an initiative:

1. Have you surfaced any opportunities to improve the product through your technical insight into the system?
2. Does the system perform better than one would expect it to?
3. Was the initiative completed sooner than one would expect it to?
4. Were you able to meet all expectations with a lower amount of guidance than one would expect?
5. Have you created or viewed product performance for your initiative and made it part of your routine to check them on some cadence?
6. Can others learn or borrow from the system you’ve helped construct?
7. Are there important lessons you’ve learned through the process that you’ve shared with the rest of the team?
8. Were you able to accomplish a personal growth goal through working on the initiative?