Engineering Leadership: Crawl, Walk, Run ...
Often times as an engineering leader you participate in product roadmap meetings. In there all ideas sound great and feels like you have an amazing opportunity to accomplish these ideas which are in turn crucial for your company's success. There is also a risk, in fact multiple risks like timelines, budget and ultimate quality of the product. In my career I always accomplished big projects with limited resources by very simple principal - Crawl , Walk, Run. I learned and practiced this from one my managers and mentor @Rajeev Rajan. I have also seen this strategy reintroduced by @James Pyers as a cupcake strategy. This is quite easy to understand but takes practice to get it right. Mostly depends on team's culture and skillsets, your cross-functional relationships and company's position in the industry. In short this is all about achieving bigger ideas by completing smaller meaningful pieces.
Define technical solution
This is a key step to this approach. You should have clear idea about achieving one or more pieces in single iteration. This vastly depends on your technology stack, type of product and teams involved. Your in-depth understanding of the technology and business needs are critical here. This is your responsibility as a leader to have execution plan ready and you should be confident about it.
Define timelines and cost
Work with leads in your team and/or project/program management teams to understand competing priorities and current workload to come up with timelines for each delivery. Now this gets tricky if there are competing priorities and/or your team needs time to ramp up. Identify your key resources and assign tasks accordingly. You may also consider seeking outside help from experts in certain domains. Allocate appropriate time to manage and coordinate work between all teams.
Get cross-functional agreement
As soon as you come out of that roadmap meeting first question hits you is "when can you get this done?". Now you as a technical leader has a job to sell your execution plan and rearrange it accordingly based on business needs. Your active contribution in product roadmap meeting is essential to have this conversation go smoothly later on.
Get your team involved
It is imperative to have your army motivated and challenged to win this war. You need to sell this to your team and get them excited to start working on this project. Good talented engineers are always interested to know how critical their contribution for the company's success and how they can get involved. Make sure management also speaks about it in townhall /all-hands meetings to underscore the importance of this project and provide clear direction.
Assign tasks and deploy teams
Once you get your team excited then it's time to assign tasks. There are many ways to get things done like creating smaller teams, choosing right team leads, define clear role and responsibilities, enough buffer in schedules for unexpected events etc. If you can leverage onshore and offshore teams schedules then you have a chance to significantly increase your productivity. Once project is kicked off then setup a way to monitor progress and set clear escalation paths. You need to make decisions fast and give crisp instructions to the execution teams. Keep reporting status to all stakeholders and make sure team is marching in right direction.
Celebrate success
Make sure you celebrate success of each milestone's delivery and acknowledge all the hard work all teams (engineering and non-engineering) are putting in.
Summary
It's all about execution. All great ideas remain ideas if not executed properly. All steps are crucial and help you evolve an engineering leader. Another major benefit of this approach is to gain trust and confidence as a technical leader and instill culture of execution and success in your team.