Everyone wants to work on what matters most: companies, teams, and engineers alike. So why do so many engineers struggle to understand their top priorities and how their work fits into the bigger picture?
The problem is not a lack of strategy. It is a lack of transparency. When roadmaps, tradeoffs, customer feedback, and decision histories are hidden in meetings or scattered across tools, context gets lost. Managers become communication bottlenecks. Engineers end up working in the dark, wasting effort and losing motivation.
In this talk, we explore how radical internal transparency can fix that. We will share how we opened customer feedback loops, shared roadmaps and design documents, exposed sprint boards, and invited engineers into management meetings, a shift that counters the misalignment common in many engineering organizations.
You will leave with concrete strategies and lightweight processes to make priorities visible, connect individual work to business outcomes, and enable engineers to act with clarity and autonomy. This talk is intended for engineering leaders who want to build high-trust, aligned teams without adding bureaucracy. We will also offer grass-roots advice for individual contributors who want to push for greater transparency and spark broader information sharing in their organizations.
