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There are always disagreements over priorities, but I think it's important to identify which _kind_ of disagreement you have going. At one extreme, you have th

by 7402 10y ago

There are always disagreements over priorities, but I think it's important to identify which _kind_ of disagreement you have going. At one extreme, you have the engineer wanting to add features just because they are fun to build, even if no customers would ever use them, and they would cost a lot of time and money to develop. In this case, the engineer is asking for too much, and should realize that business requirements have to rule in the end. At the other extreme, you have management asking for shortcuts that could lead to the death of customers that trust in the product. In this case, there may be an ethical obligation to blow the whistle and refuse to participate. Most disagreements are somewhere in between. There is a sliding-scale here, and you should figure out where you are on this scale for each potential disagreement. Some things are closer to engineering's turf and some are closer to marketing's turf. I have never had a job where everything went 100% my way. If I can hit 70%, that's really pretty good. If it drops below 40%, I start looking for a new job. One thing that may help is to realize that you can be completely correct technically, while still having to accept decisions made on the business side. You can count it as a "win" if you can explain the technical issues well enough so that others understand your point - even if the others still have to choose something else in the end due to non-technical reasons.

WorldMaker 10y ago
There's definitely a need to pick battles: if you battle every decision it's easier for people to just think you are stubborn and they might not listen to your concerns. In addition to that is the skill in knowing how to bring concerns up in the first place. At least for me, in some of my experience, it has been much easier for me to focus on trying to pick my battles in the first place than getting better at how I fight the battles. There's lots of little things in the way that you might word things: instead of "We should do x", trying to get the habits down of things more like "What if we did x instead?", or "Do you think x might be a better approach?", or "Is it possible to do x here?" There's that saying that the best leaders are the ones that make you think that the best ideas were your ideas, in the Inception meaning of trying to plant the idea seed in someone's head and hoping it takes hold and grows into the best idea. That applies here to, even as an "underling" to management: everyone feels like they are on the same team when they are all fighting the battle together and the easiest way to get them on your side is to make them think they had the idea in the first place. It's not easy to do, and you aren't going to succeed every time, but a goal to work towards.

by 7402 10y ago

WorldMaker 10y ago

There's definitely a need to pick battles: if you battle every decision it's easier for people to just think you are stubborn and they might not listen to your concerns. In addition to that is the skill in knowing how to bring concerns up in the first place. At least for me, in some of my experience, it has been much easier for me to focus on trying to pick my battles in the first place than getting better at how I fight the battles. There's lots of little things in the way that you might word things: instead of "We should do x", trying to get the habits down of things more like "What if we did x instead?", or "Do you think x might be a better approach?", or "Is it possible to do x here?" There's that saying that the best leaders are the ones that make you think that the best ideas were your ideas, in the Inception meaning of trying to plant the idea seed in someone's head and hoping it takes hold and grows into the best idea. That applies here to, even as an "underling" to management: everyone feels like they are on the same team when they are all fighting the battle together and the easiest way to get them on your side is to make them think they had the idea in the first place. It's not easy to do, and you aren't going to succeed every time, but a goal to work towards.