A guide for Sourcegraph engineers
Related
How to be a Tech Lead 2026
Successful engineers at Sourcegraph
What's a Project DRI?
As Project DRI (Directly Responsible Individual), you own the delivery of a specific project. You are responsible for its scope, plan, communication, and successful completion. You work closely with your Tech Lead for technical guidance and your EM for resourcing and commitments.
Any engineer can be a project DRI. It is not limited to senior engineers or Tech Leads.
Your responsibilities are:
- Set scope: Define the vision, goals, and scope of the project.
- Plan and track: Create and maintain a plan for delivering the project.
- Gather input: Collect feedback internally and externally to build a lovable product.
- Communicate: Keep stakeholders informed of progress, risks, and changes.
- Ship with high quality: Make sure the project gets into customers' hands and follow up on feedback.
Set scope
Define the scope
Any format works (RFC, Notion doc, Linear issue or project). The most important thing is that it exists. It should communicate:
- The goals and the customer impact of this project ("build an admin dashboard to show all foo widgets to help expansion at strategic customers")
- The estimated timeline ("~8 weeks of work for 2 engineers")
- Who is involved (team members, PM, Designer, etc.)
- 💡TIP: Try to avoid cross-project dependencies. They are harder to track and add communication overhead. Instead, see if you can implement dependencies internally.
- Important technical decisions, trade offs, and alternatives considered and why ("we use this API, don't change backend, use tool X, also remove legacy Y, build instead of adding a dependency" …)
- 💡TIP: Risks are part of any project. It's better to make them explicit and to talk about them. ("we don't know if x is feasible, but in a week from now, we will because we'll run some POC")