The Eng Review Episode #3: Do Nothing?
About this series
There are a lot of excellent system design newsletters out there. Most of them cover understanding an existing system in depth or designing a new system from scratch. Both are extremely valuable in their own right but this series is different.
One of your roles as a senior leader is to make decisions. Sometimes you have to make design decisions weighing trade offs when there is no clear right answer. Sometimes you have to make decisions navigating the technical and human elements in the equation. You also have to own the consequences of your decisions as an engineering leader.
In case you are thinking these are manager/director/VP problems, think again! Staff+ ICs need to make these decisions too!
In this series I cover real engineering projects. I go into the details of the tradeoffs we encountered and decisions made. Some are my stories and some are ones I’ve collected from colleagues.
Each episode has 2 sections:
The Choice: In this section I lay out the background and context for you along with the decision question. You can put yourself in the decision maker’s shoes and try to think of what questions you’d ask or what decision you’d make and how you’d explain it to the team. This section is for all ChaiTime readers.
The Outcome: In this section I talk about what actually happened. Some are success stories, some failures but many in-between. I share my own lessons learned - technical and leadership related - so you can learn from my experiences! This section is for my paid subscribers only since we will also be discussing it further in the Substack chat.
Today’s post is a guest post by
who was a Director of Engineering & Product Management at Remitly. He is currently the founder and CEO of Revarta.Connect with him on LinkedIn
The Choice
At Remitly, I led the Marketing Technology Product and Engineering functions for a while. One area of focus for my team was our promotions platform which managed our customer incentives. Promotions are one of the 4Ps of marketing and a critical aspect of how a B2C company in a high inertia industry like FinTech grows.
Here is a quick insight into the lifecycle of a single promotion:
Suppose our business metrics told us that a segment of customers who signed up in February showed engagement below expected baseline. Our marketing team would sometimes make the call to drive up such engagement via a promotion. They would then need to create the marketing and analytics plans and generate marketing materials. They also needed engineering bandwidth to set up the promotion for this customer segment, and reach out to customers informing them of the promotion.
Now imagine doing this for multiple customer segments across multiple markets and multiple product lines in a growing business. The list of promotions you’d want to run would be long and all consuming for the teams involved!
Given the number of steps required to set up and execute each promotion, our small engineering team had to make a choice. We had the following options.
Option 1 - Automate the Pain
Recommendation:
Invest engineering bandwidth to automate the promotions setup such that marketing can run the promotions completely self-serve. The automation itself could be any of (or a combination of) Build, Buy or Away Team.
Pros:
Empower our marketing team to execute the entire marketing strategy without engineering as a bottleneck.
Free up eng bandwidth to go focus on other initiatives in the long term.
Cons:
A Build approach could be costly and unpredictable.
A Buy or Away Team approach would add Yet Another Tool to connect in the ecosystem - especially with a 3P to manage contracts, privacy, security, training, onboarding.
Option 2 - Do Nothing
Recommendation:
The ruthless prioritization mindset would say no to this task because there was a path to get it done even if full of friction. We could use our limited resources for things that had no other path to fulfillment.
Pros:
Minimal ongoing investment which opens up the opportunity to invest in other areas.
forced prioritization of which promotions to run, possibly leading to a more thoughtful marketing strategy.
Cons:
Ideas die at the idea stage itself — the daunting task of running such a campaign means good ideas and creativity might just never see the light of day which is bad for the business long-term.
The high number of manual steps mean increased risk of human errors which could cause quality degradations or outages.
You are the engineering director who leads the team that works on marketing and growth. Which option will you choose? Would you add any other options to this list?
The Outcome
 | A guest post by
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