{"id":"131e400e-6c63-42da-8c59-f97da0f59fb4","shortId":"adRDm4","kind":"skill","title":"engineering-culture","tagline":"Produce an Engineering Culture Operating System Pack (culture code, DevEx backlog, workflow contract).","description":"# Engineering Culture\n\n## Scope\n\n**Covers**\n- Diagnosing the current engineering culture *and* delivery system (technical, architectural, cultural, and management capabilities)\n- Defining a clear **engineering culture code** (principles → behaviors → decision rules → anti-patterns)\n- Aligning org structure with architecture (Conway’s Law) and reducing cross-team friction\n- Increasing **clock speed** (safe shipping + experimentation throughput) and improving DevEx\n- Creating a practical cross-functional workflow contract (how engineering + PM/Design/Marketing collaborate in the same toolchain)\n- Making AI-assisted development safe and effective (humans as “architects”: spec, review, and oversight)\n\n**When to use**\n- “Help me improve engineering culture / DevEx and make it concrete.”\n- “Our delivery is slow—build a plan to increase shipping speed without breaking things.”\n- “Our org structure fights our architecture—analyze Conway’s Law and propose changes.”\n- “We want tighter processes and faster experimentation (higher clock speed).”\n- “Non-engineering functions struggle to work with engineering—define a shared workflow contract.”\n- “We’re adopting AI coding tools/agents—set norms so engineers shift toward higher-level design and review.”\n\n**When NOT to use**\n- You need to respond to an active incident or outage (use incident response/runbooks)\n- You need HR/legal policy, investigations, or employee relations handling (involve HR/legal)\n- You only need to implement a specific technical improvement (e.g., “set up CI”) without culture/org/process work\n- You need a full company strategy/roadmap prioritization across many bets (use `prioritizing-roadmap`)\n- You want to build or refresh company-wide or team culture beyond engineering (use `building-team-culture`)\n- You need to redesign org structure, reporting lines, or team topology at a company level (use `organizational-design`)\n- You need a prioritized technical roadmap for specific projects or systems (use `technical-roadmaps`)\n- You want to improve designer-engineer collaboration workflows specifically (use `design-engineering`)\n\n## Inputs\n\n**Minimum required**\n- Org context: product(s), stage, engineering size, team topology, on-call model\n- Current symptoms + 2–5 examples (e.g., slow delivery, flaky deploys, low ownership, poor collaboration, high toil)\n- Current delivery system snapshot (release cadence, CI/CD maturity, test strategy, environments)\n- Architecture constraints (e.g., monolith vs services; coupling hotspots; ownership boundaries)\n- Cross-functional workflow reality (where work is tracked, how decisions are made, how releases happen)\n- Desired outcomes (what should be *more true* in 4–12 weeks?) + timeline constraints\n\n**Missing-info strategy**\n- Ask up to 5 questions from [references/INTAKE.md](references/INTAKE.md) (3–5 at a time), then proceed with explicit assumptions.\n- If metrics are missing, use best-effort ranges and label confidence; list instrumentation gaps.\n- Do not request secrets, credentials, or proprietary identifiers; use redacted summaries.\n\n## Outputs (deliverables)\n\nProduce an **Engineering Culture Operating System Pack** in Markdown (in-chat; or as files if requested):\n\n1) **Culture + capability snapshot** (what’s true today; evidence; capability gaps)\n2) **Engineering culture code (v1)** (3–7 principles with behaviors, do/don’t, decision rules, anti-patterns)\n3) **Org ↔ architecture alignment brief** (Conway’s Law analysis + proposed operating model changes)\n4) **Clock speed + DevEx improvement backlog** (prioritized initiatives with owners, sequencing, metrics)\n5) **Cross-functional workflow contract** (GitHub/issue/PR/release norms; how non-engineers contribute; AI norms)\n6) **Rollout + measurement plan** (30/60/90, rituals, metrics + guardrails, feedback loops)\n7) **Risks / Open questions / Next steps** (always included)\n\nTemplates: [references/TEMPLATES.md](references/TEMPLATES.md)  \nExpanded guidance: [references/WORKFLOW.md](references/WORKFLOW.md)\n\n## Workflow (7 steps)\n\n### 1) Intake + boundary setting\n- **Inputs:** User context; [references/INTAKE.md](references/INTAKE.md).\n- **Actions:** Confirm scope (team vs org), decision owner(s), timeline, and constraints. Identify any HR/legal or active-incident concerns and route appropriately. Confirm which deliverables to produce.\n- **Outputs:** Context snapshot + assumptions/unknowns list.\n- **Checks:** Scope boundaries are explicit; success definition is stated in observable terms.\n\n### 2) Diagnose the current culture as a delivery system (capability map)\n- **Inputs:** Symptoms/examples; current process/tooling; architecture context.\n- **Actions:** Build a capability map across **technical**, **architectural**, **cultural**, and **management** capabilities. Capture evidence and gaps (not platitudes). Distinguish stated culture vs lived culture.\n- **Outputs:** Culture + capability snapshot (draft).\n- **Checks:** Each claimed problem has at least one piece of evidence (example, metric, observed behavior) or is labeled “needs data”.\n\n### 3) Define the target culture (culture code v1)\n- **Inputs:** Snapshot; constraints; what already works.\n- **Actions:** Pick 2–4 priority shifts, then write a culture code: 3–7 principles with behaviors, do/don’t, decision rules, and anti-patterns. Prefer rules that increase autonomy while reducing ambiguity.\n- **Outputs:** Engineering culture code (v1).\n- **Checks:** Every principle includes a concrete “how we work” example and at least one measurable/observable signal.\n\n### 4) Align org structure with architecture (Conway’s Law)\n- **Inputs:** Current team topology; architecture coupling/ownership hotspots; dependency pain.\n- **Actions:** Map org → architecture fit. Propose changes: team boundaries, ownership, interfaces, and standardization (e.g., leveling definitions, incident policies, review expectations) where misalignment causes friction.\n- **Outputs:** Org ↔ architecture alignment brief.\n- **Checks:** Proposed changes include migration/transition steps and explicit trade-offs (what gets worse).\n\n### 5) Increase clock speed (safe shipping + experimentation throughput)\n- **Inputs:** Current shipping/experiment cadence; pipeline constraints; quality constraints.\n- **Actions:** Define “clock speed” targets and bottlenecks. Propose initiatives that raise throughput safely (small batches, CI reliability, test strategy, progressive delivery, observability). Convert into a prioritized backlog.\n- **Outputs:** Clock speed + DevEx improvement backlog (draft).\n- **Checks:** Each initiative has an owner, an effort range, a dependency note, and a metric/leading indicator.\n\n### 6) Create the workflow contract (including AI norms)\n- **Inputs:** Collaboration pain points; tool constraints; roles.\n- **Actions:** Specify how work flows from idea → issue → PR → deploy → learn. Define cross-functional participation (where PM/Design/Marketing contribute) and working agreements (review SLAs, merge/deploy policy, experiment ownership). Add AI-assisted development norms: where agents help, human review requirements, and safe data handling.\n- **Outputs:** Cross-functional workflow contract.\n- **Checks:** The contract reduces common failure modes (stalled PRs, unclear ownership, “drive-by” requests) and is teachable to new hires.\n\n### 7) Rollout + measurement + quality gate\n- **Inputs:** Draft pack.\n- **Actions:** Create a 30/60/90 rollout plan with rituals/cadence and training. Define metrics and guardrails (e.g., DORA + quality + DevEx). Run [references/CHECKLISTS.md](references/CHECKLISTS.md) and score with [references/RUBRIC.md](references/RUBRIC.md). Finalize **Risks / Open questions / Next steps**.\n- **Outputs:** Final Engineering Culture Operating System Pack.\n- **Checks:** The first 1–2 actions can start this week; measurement is feasible; risks/trade-offs are explicit.\n\n## Quality gate (required)\n- Use [references/CHECKLISTS.md](references/CHECKLISTS.md) and [references/RUBRIC.md](references/RUBRIC.md).\n- Always include: **Risks**, **Open questions**, **Next steps**.\n\n## Examples\n\n**Example 1 (slow delivery + DevEx):** “Use `engineering-culture`. Context: B2B SaaS, 35 engineers, monolith + a few services, weekly releases, rising incidents. Goal: increase shipping speed without quality regressions. Output: an Engineering Culture Operating System Pack with a clock-speed backlog and a workflow contract.”\n\n**Example 2 (Conway misalignment):** “We have 6 teams but architecture ownership is unclear and everything depends on platform. Analyze Conway’s Law issues and propose a new operating model + standardization (leveling, code ownership, on-call) plus a rollout plan.”\n\n**Boundary example:** “Write a generic essay about what engineering culture is.”\nResponse: explain this skill produces a concrete operating system pack; ask for context/symptoms/timeline or provide the intake checklist and an example template from [references/TEMPLATES.md](references/TEMPLATES.md).\n\n**Boundary example 2:** “Help me redesign our company's organizational structure and reporting lines.”\nResponse: full org design (reporting structure, span of control, team topology beyond engineering) is better served by `organizational-design`. This skill focuses on engineering culture, delivery systems, and Conway's Law alignment within the engineering org.\n\n## Anti-patterns (common failure modes)\n\n1. **Values poster syndrome**: Writing aspirational engineering principles (“we value quality”) without concrete behaviors, decision rules, or anti-patterns. Culture codes must be actionable: “when X happens, we do Y.”\n2. **Tool-first transformation**: Adopting a new CI/CD tool or framework and declaring culture improved. Culture change requires behavior change; tools are enablers, not solutions.\n3. **Ignoring Conway's Law**: Proposing a microservices architecture without acknowledging that the org structure has 2 teams and no clear ownership boundaries. Architecture must match team topology.\n4. **Clock speed without guardrails**: Pushing to ship faster without defining quality, reliability, or safety guardrails. Speed without safety creates incidents and erodes trust.\n5. **Top-down culture decree**: Announcing culture changes via email without rollout rituals, feedback loops, or measurement. 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