Build a high-performing engineering team

(This is a part of a series of blog posts where we jot down the key takeaways from various round tables with Engineering Leaders from top technology companies across Europe! You can find the previous post here.)

We hosted three more round tables recently, on 24th June, 1st July and 2nd July. These professionals represented a wide array of industries across Europe and a varied level of industry experience, with each leading a team of between 20 to 100+ developers.

We covered a variety of topics like —

1. Critical metrics for measuring the performance of a team
2. Measuring individual productivity vs team productivity
3. Managing hyper-growth and effective team communication
4. Implementing a DevOps culture within the team

We started the discussion as usual by mentioning the top metrics specified in the book Accelerate, which you can find here. To recap, those are —

1. Lead time — the time from code committed to code in production

2. Deployment frequency — frequency of deployment to production

3. Time to restore — detecting a user-impacting incident to having it remediated

4. Change fail percentage — the percentage of Hotfixes, rollbacks, outages, patches

Here is the summary of the interesting discussion and a few key takeaways —

• Most of the Engineering Managers believe that measuring team performance is usually better than measuring individual performance. This is possible because these companies have a very robust hiring process, and they make sure that each engineer that they hire is of the highest quality and conforms with the culture of the company/team.
• They focus quite heavily on OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) to measure the performance of a team. The OKRs are usually set across the company on a quarterly or bi-yearly basis.
• They also believe that since the individual scrum teams are quite small, it is mostly quite easy to flag the individual low-performers.
• They also stressed on the importance of conducting frequent 1:1 meetings with their team members and also conducting Skip Level 1:1 meetings to identify their blind spots and identify if the team is happy overall
• While talking about hyper-growth, the managers mentioned a few interesting things — 1) It is a given that during a hyper-growth phase of a company, the internal processes are bound to break. You need to analyse and adapt those processes for the new people coming in; 2) You need to hire the appropriate people who can cope with this hyper-growth phase and gel well with the existing team; 3) There might also be a case that some of your existing team itself might not be able to cope with the new changes and they might end up leaving, which is completely natural — no need to worry in these situations.
• One of the managers mentioned that it is also vital to create a culture of trust and keep the motivation levels of the employees high, especially in a remote environment.

Stay tuned for the takeaways from our next round table! You can find the links to our round table events here. If you would like to learn more about our Engineering Managers round tables, feel free to get in touch with my teammate Antonio Sabado at antonio@indorse.io!