Bottom-up or top-down?

How much authority does your software team have? Are you required to use Jira and estimate stories, or does your team determine the best workflow? Can you choose your own IDE, language, and toolchain, or is that decided by the company? And when it comes to professional development, are you learning what excites you, or is it driven by your manager’s priorities?

In small businesses and startups, team and individual autonomy are often a given - there are fewer rules. But as companies grow, they often strive for standards and alignment, thinking it will bring efficiency.

Instead, we could encourage and celebrate individual initiative. We could inspire people to create their own tools, to develop templates, to teach others what they know. If a developer does a small lunch and learn on containers, hosts a code kata or demonstrates TDD through pairing and others see it celebrated imagine what this does to the company culture. I believe this can lead to teams that are not only efficient but also inspired and motivated to excel.

Contrast this with a scenario where a single team, an ivory tower architect, or a scrum master dictates web frameworks, branching strategies, or (often unnecessary) processes and artifacts for all teams. Does an architect know better than the people on the ground which tools suit their workflows? And what does this do to the culture? Will people feel empowered to share their ideas and experiment? Will anyone hack away at night on a cool new way to load data, improve service discovery, or go talk to users to discover what would really move the needle? Or do we risk that developers will simply do what they’re told?

What are your thoughts? How does your company navigate these decisions, and what has worked best for you? How big can a company grow while still emphasizing team autonomy over top-down decisions? Is this all too black and white?

I'm curious and don't have the answers but in 2025 I'll aim to be a better role model for individual initiative and act as a counterbalance to the ever-present push for more top-down decisions.