Guidance for EMs for engaging with Infrastructure
Background
When the AI initiatives were launched, the Infrastructure group proactively kept up to date with the initatives that were developing in this space. The intention being to make launching these new features as fast as possible. As we progressed, the AI proposals solidified to a few specific efforts and we worked together to ship them and stay ahead of potential delays.
With Code Suggestions being live and the AI stage groups coalescing into a section, we need to reconsider how we engage so that it is more sustainable. We also want to find a way to engage with more than just the AI section as the same level of service should apply to all section.
Further details
From the stage group's perspective, they want to deliver features quickly, safely, and have them be successful. From the Infrastructure department's perspective, they want to support this but need time to assess the reliability and performance of some features. Engaging early in the development lifecycle is important but we haven't had much success at this in the past. Equally so, we don't want to introduce new gates and process that is seen as a checkbox exercise.
The Infrastructure department also does not have enough knowledge to proactively read through all milestone proposals to look for the items we should focus on.
Proposal
In the meeting, a proposal was made to rely on the Engineering Managers more. If they were supplied with more details on what to look out for which was regularly reviewed, they could become effective partners to highlight possible reliability and scalability concerns.
These are the artifacts we would need to produce:
- list of situations where the EM should consider engaging with Infrastructure
- list of situations where a Readiness Review would be required
- complete the flowchart that describes when to use Runway
These would be given to the EMs for them to consider when reviewing the upcoming projects for their teams.