At Cronometer, things are moving fast—and we’re excited about it! As we grow, we’re constantly looking for better ways to build software, make decisions, and nurture a thriving engineering culture. One recent project we’re especially proud of is our Technical Roadmap. By organizing and prioritizing our ideas in this structured way, we keep our long-term vision and values front and center.
Embracing the Shape-Up Philosophy
We’re big fans of Basecamp’s Shape-Up method, and we’ve adapted it to better fit our culture. One of the best parts of Shape-Up is that anyone at Cronometer can pitch an idea, empowering everyone to contribute creatively to solving our most interesting challenges. As we’ve scaled up, organizing these great ideas into a clear, actionable plan became critical.
Crafting Our Technical Roadmap
Engineering leadership collaborated on clarifying and prioritizing our technical initiatives. To guide our thinking, we focused our conversations through a couple of lenses:
- Long-term Vision: “This is where we know we’ll be in 2027, and this is what we must do to get there.”
- Engineering Excellence: “How can we build a truly outstanding engineering team?”
With this context to guide us, we organized all the fantastic ideas into a clear roadmap, visualizing connections, dependencies, and priorities. We grouped this work into four practical, human-centered themes:
- Developer Acceleration: Making our developers’ lives easier so they can deliver great software quickly, reliably, and with less friction.
- Infrastructure Modernization: Updating and improving our technical foundations to comfortably handle growth, while ensuring stability and security.
- Culture: Fostering an inclusive, collaborative, and transparent environment by encouraging communication, learning, and regular team engagement.
- Process: Making our daily work clearer, simpler, and more effective through continuous, thoughtful improvements.
We invited feedback from across Cronometer, refining the roadmap by adding timelines, clarifying benefits, and setting out a practical sequence for implementation.
Putting Plans into Action
We’re already turning our roadmap into reality—and one of the exciting outcomes is this blog! Through regular posts, we aim to:
- Show how our work aligns with Cronometer’s core values.
- Share exciting projects and lessons learned.
- Attract talented engineers who resonate with our culture.
- Help our team develop their communication skills and professional growth.
Coming Attractions
We already have a slate of articles in progress, including deep dives into:
- Modernizing our infrastructure: from breaking up legacy workloads to adopting distributed job queues for more scalable, reliable processing.
- Accelerating development through tooling and automation: including how we use GitHub Actions and CodeDeploy to streamline our CI/CD pipeline and get code into production faster and more safely.
- Strengthening our engineering culture: with practices that help us scale sustainably, such as our adoption of trunk-based development and improved collaboration patterns.
Join the Journey
We can’t wait to share more stories, insights, and learnings from our engineering adventures. If Cronometer’s mission and engineering culture resonate with you, stay tuned and connect with our team!
