Engineering Enablement by DX Assumptions as code: SiriusXM’s approach to platform prioritization
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Apr 10, 2026 Mina Tawadrous, Associate Director of Platform Engineering at SiriusXM who built an assumptions-as-code system and AI prioritization tooling. Eleanor Millman, Senior Staff Product Manager who led platform product and DX efforts at VMware and Google. They discuss scaling platform prioritization beyond RICE, turning assumptions into versioned code, using weighted impact factors to drive trade-offs, and AI workflows that surface and validate assumptions for faster decisions.
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How We Chose Between Competing Cross-Team Projects
- Cross-team conflicts over shared dependencies were common before the framework.
- Example: DevEx and Delivery both needed Cloud Foundation permissions; the weighted framework clarified which cross-team projects the org should prioritize.
Treat Assumptions As Code In A Central Repo
- Store assumptions in a central repository and validate them as part of planning.
- Mina's system lets coding agents pull assumptions, prompt validation, and create PRs to update the assumptions repo so teams reuse research and reduce misalignment.
We Thought The Dashboard Would Prove It But It Didn't
- The curse of knowledge caused major misestimates in user counts during scoring.
- Mina recounts expecting to pull a dashboard showing 350 affected users, only to discover team members held very different assumptions during scoring conversations.