Hacking your (Engineering) Culture ‣ Gustavo Veloso

Table of Contents

“Culture eats Strategy for Breakfast” - Peter Drucker¹

On August of last year I’ve shared some thoughts about Engineering Culture, with some good examples and an intent to extract foundations of great company cultures: Trust, Shared sense of responsibility, Practice-oriented, Tailor-made and Diversity.

Since then I’ve been experiencing a lot of new and challenging changes on my career and on my personal life. Looking them retrospectively and with an extra nudge from one of my greatest professional references I’ve started thinking and reading more about when culture (engineering or your broader company culture) could (or should) be hacked - hacking in the constructive meaning of the term.

Signs your culture needs to be hacked

1. It’s still tacit

Culture tends to start organically on startup days of every company but it should be explicit after. When you got bigger you’ll need to write your culture down to something really available to your entire team. Your core values should be explicit on every situation and on every department - R&D, HR, Finance or Marketing, everywhere.

2. The executive team does not support it entirely

Culture is the most important asset of any company - even more than people. People leaves, are fired, or die. Your company culture will live forever

All strong cultures out there are sponsored by C-level executives. No culture will survive if not supported and applied by your top executive team. Drive a company by its culture is easier but it’s still hard - and even harder when the hard times are in place.

The easy days will be easy. When the things are going bad your culture should shine - rest assured, if you give your company culture a chance it will bring the great times back.

3. It’s not getting job done

Sometimes your culture is in place but it’s simply outdated and need some tuning. Great cultures embraces change when change is required. Awesome cultures are tailor-made and practice-oriented.

Hacking your company culture

“For individuals, character is destiny. For organizations, culture is destiny.” - Tony Hsieh, Zappos CEO

1. Be humble, be kind

Hacking a culture is not easy and have a huge room to be misunderstood. Be humble. Be kind. You’re not the only individual that is trying to help your company succeed. And you could be driven by the wrong assumptions.

Hacking a culture is risky. If you really want to do that do it openly. It’s better (and safer) to do it together with people you trust. And they probably will help you. Again, you’re not alone on the continuous effort of making your company the greatest place it could be.

3. Baby Steps

You got it: it’s hard and risky. Given that start small, test and refactor. Repeat.

4. Plan for the sad path

Hacking a culture is closer to a zero-sum game rather than win-win agreements. People will point you if you fail. And let’s say: Hacking a culture is hard and risky. Be prepared, bad things will happen on the road.

5. Plan for the happy path

Let’s use Pareto Principle? You will fail 80% of the time you try to hack your culture. If you achieve the lucky 20%, be prepared to go big. You will need to evangelize your recently tuned culture everywhere. It will not be that risky anymore but it’s still hard.

Happy Hacking! 🤓

Or for lunch ↩︎