Maintaining communication channels between individual contributors (ICs), managers, and executives is vital as organizations grow. This article explores how Carta has harnessed the power of a small group of senior engineers to bridge the gap between global strategy and local decision-making. This group is called the "Navigators".
Dan Fike, deputy to the CTO at Carta, and Shawna Martell, a Senior Staff Engineer at Carta, explain how they combine a written engineering strategy with the Navigators, who help teams interpret the engineering strategy within their domains. (An InfoQ podcast on this topic is also available.) Navigators replace a need for consensus and boost velocity by combining technical context, domain context, strategic alignment, and judgment to make engineering decisions quickly.
Carta has 12 Navigators for a ~400-person engineering organization. Those Navigators are directly accountable to the CTO. They maintain a one-to-many relationship between Navigators and Engineering teams. Every team is in scope for exactly one Navigator, so there’s never uncertainty about who the Navigator is for a given project. These Navigators serve three sets of people in different ways.
First, they serve the engineers and managers on their assigned teams. Navigators are engineers and members of the same teams they serve. They have and maintain a clear understanding of their team’s work and challenges. They balance that with the company's needs and challenges more holistically to make decisions locally that minimize disruption to the team while optimizing for the company.
Second, they serve the engineering executive. While Navigators exist as engineers within the company's standard org chart, they also sit near the root of a hypothetical second "influence org chart". They connect directly to an executive and act as influential multipliers to carry the executive's voice deep into the org chart. In turn, they can also carry the voice of engineers up to the executive.
This shortcut of information flow does not relieve directors and managers from doing similar work; instead, they tend to cover different (though overlapping) sets of information and context that are key to making good decisions at all levels. This plays out in situations like roadmap planning. A navigator's technical knowledge can help them identify dependencies that might not be immediately obvious to management or the product.
Finally, the Navigators serve each other. While they don't operate as a collective or committee, they support each other with additional context, perspective, or feedback. They'll also often collaborate to make decisions that intersect multiple projects or teams.
This content is an excerpt from a recent InfoQ article by Ben Linders, "Accelerating Technical Decision-Making by Empowering ICs with Engineering Strategy". A podcast on the same topic is also available: "Decentralizing Decision Making with Shawna Martell & Dan Fike".
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