KW Workshop: Engineering Values & Decision-Making Tradeoffs

KW Workshop: Engineering Values & Decision-Making Tradeoffs

Every engineering team makes dozens of tradeoff decisions every week — speed vs. quality, innovation vs. stability, moving fast vs. getting it right. But most of the time, those tradeoffs are made implicitly, inconsistently, or differently depending on who's in the room.

This workshop is about making the invisible visible. If you had 100 points to distribute across the things your engineering team values — speed, quality, security, creativity, simplicity — how would you distribute them? More importantly, would your last few major decisions actually reflect that distribution?

That gap between what we say we value and what we actually optimize for is where the real leadership challenge lives. It shows up when it's Thursday and the release is Friday. It shows up when the business wants a feature and your team wants to pay down tech debt. It shows up when a new hire asks "how do we make decisions around here?" and nobody has a clear answer.

In this hands-on session, we'll work through exercises designed to surface your real engineering values — not the aspirational ones on a slide deck, but the ones your decisions reveal. You'll pressure-test your assumptions in small groups with other local engineering leaders who are navigating the same tensions, and walk away with a clearer picture of what your team actually stands for and how to communicate it.

Come ready to be honest with yourself. That's where the good stuff happens.

Organized by local leader: Sasha Hall, Engineering Manager @ Planitar, Makers of iGUIDE