A Guide to Running an Engineering Program
In 2020, Shopify celebrated 15 years of coding, building, and changing the global commerce landscape forever. In that time, the team built an enormous amount of tooling, products, features, and an insanely scalable architecture.
With the velocity and pace we’ve been keeping, through growing surface areas that enable commerce for 8% of the world’s adult population and with an evolving architecture to support our rapid rate of development, the platform complexity has increased exponentially. Despite this, we still look hard problems straight in the face and decide that despite how complex it seems, it's what we want as a business. We can and will do this.
We’ve taken on huge engineering programs in the past that cross over multiple areas of complexity on the platform. These teams deliver features such as the Storefront Renderer, world class performance for events like BFCM, platform wide capacity planning and testing, and efficient tooling for engineers at Shopify like static typing.
All programs require a clearly defined definition of done or the North Star if you will. This clarity and alignment is absolutely essential to ensure the team is all going in the same direction. For us, a number of documented assets are produced that enable company wide alignment and provide a framework for contextual status updates, risk mitigation, and decisions.
