(in the context of big tech companies)

the priority of a project is to ship!

But it’s really important that one person on the project has an end-to-end understanding of the whole thing: how it hangs together technically, and what product or business purpose it serves.

You only know you’ve shipped when your company’s leadership acknowledge you’ve shipped.

you have to get clear on what the company is looking to get out of the project. [...] Align your work and communication accordingly!

Second, no matter the project goal, your leadership team will always have basically zero technical context about the project. They will rely on you for estimates, to answer technical questions, and to anticipate technical problems. Maintaining that trust should be your top priority.

How?

• track record of having shipped in the past.
• project confidence
• project competence
• communicate professionally and concisely. Share updates.

Then getting to production! Often a key detail is missing. Sometimes the user documents are stored in memcached and are MB large, or the data stored are unexpectedly sensitive legally sensible.

Can we ship right now?

Bring up the feature to as many eyes as possible!

If you want to ship, you need to do the exact opposite: you need to deploy as much as you can as early as possible, and you need to do the scariest changes as early as you can possibly do them.