Company, Team, Self

(Good) advice doesn't deal with all of life's subtelties; that's an impossible prescription with no resiliency. It sets you up to figure it out yourself.

A forest is grown one tree at a time.

A company is formed because someone, the founders, thinking for themselves. They want to create a product, solve a problem, learn an industry, or they just want to get rich. Essentially "do the thing". All of these start from "self".

With any luck, the founder get some funding, sell some products, got enough resources to build up their team. A team with people who thinks about themselves. They are the people who want to build a product, solve their own problem, learn an industry, or get rich. All of these joiner start from "self".

Then the founder found first hand that, after all the interview, vision and mission statements, OKR and all the charade, their objectives isn't quite exactly aligned with the teammates. Instead of "doing the thing", they need motivate their teammates to "do the thing".

One more iteration we are at the company level.

As other comment points out, it is really the executive's duty in making the alignment. IMO, you don't make the alignment by indoctrinating the same message over and over, but by understanding your team, and how your team's motivation contributes to a wider company goal. Similarly, you don't indoctrinate your customer how good your product is, you understand their need and refine your product. It's the same process.

Moreover, a so-called company goal is really just optimizing a beaten path, get more user, get more usage, get more revenue. Kodak's company goal back then I bet was about improving some of the measureable metrics. As a company, you do want to harness some creative power. Let some of your people do what they like some of the time is highly beneficial. It is the same creation force that gives birth to numerous ideas.

If there is a higher goal than the company goal, it is yours. How would you leverage the opportunities and resources offered by your employment to achieve your personal goal? That is the question. And you achieve company's goal by tapping that source of energy from your teammates.

I think I mentioned in my post like 3 times that this is a difficult thing to do even for those who are skilled. My point is that you still have to do it if you want a chance to get the outcomes you desire.

// How can you really provide hard evidence that an application with 1 database instead of 12 will be easier to develop in?

Great example. Like I said, the first step is to confirm a shared understanding of the problem. "Easier to develop" is not relevant, but "feature delivery velocity" is. So step 1, I'd ask the people I am trying to persuade whether they perceive a feature delivery velocity issue on your team.

If the answer is no - well that's a whole different conversation.

Assuming the answer is yes, the next question is - would it be impactful to the business if the velocity went up and should we think about how to do that? Again, if the answer is no - that's interesting. Ask why not?

If the answer is yes - then you come back with "as far as I can tell, one of the sources of our low velocity is the complexity. For example, we have 12 databases and on average, every feature requires 6 of them to be changed. From casual observation, each DB takes X days to update so this is how much tax we're paying every feature."

Then you ask - "does this make sense to you? I am not saying this is the only problem but it seems apparent to me as your technology lead that we're paying a high complexity cost for this design. Let me know if you're with me?"

If they say "no" - great - troubleshoot that.

If they say "yes" - "ok great. I have an idea for how we can go down from 12 databases to 3 at a development cost of X. Ballpark we will recoup that cost in Y months. Should we try this?"

In my experience, walking people through it this way patiently (and it may be multiple conversations), I either get a "yes" or learn a good reason why it shouldn't be done, 100% of the time. Notice that in this approach, I neither lead with the answer "12 DBs bad!" nor overload them with technical detail - but I give them just enough to follow my own logic - after all you must have done similar thinking (even if just intuitively) to arrive at your conclusion. Now you're externalizing your intuition in a way that others can follow.

Like I said - very hard to do. Most people don't bother, many other people are horrible at it (but way ahead of those who don't try!) But either way, this is the only way to get shit done so you gotta do it.