Building 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 two fantastic round tables this week, on 16th and 17th June. While the first one had Engineering Managers, the second one was focused on CTOs specifically. 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 started by mentioning the 4 KPIs from the book “Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps!”, which you can find here and also the “State of DevOps 2019” report, 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

We have seen similar trends across companies of all sizes and from all industries across Europe. Until now, we have spoken with about 40 Engineering Leaders, and these are the commonalities —

• Several Engineering Managers tend to consider the Accelerate book as gospel and follow those metrics to the letter!
• Outside of these four metrics mentioned above, “Velocity” and “Stability/Uptime” are considered extremely important
• Microservices architecture, good test coverage and efficient CI/CD pipelines are common themes across high-performing organizations
• Beyond just measuring the performance/productivity of the teams, managers also feel that it is crucial to measure the morale, happiness of the team
• Trust and autonomy are essential virtues that the managers want to imbibe in their teams
• While most managers agree that Productivity has increased due to the COVID and lockdown situation, currently, teams are getting fatigued, and some developers might be starting to show signs of burnout.

Other than the above trends, here is the summary of some other exciting points mentioned by the managers —

1. One of the managers highly recommended this book -https://www.amazon.co.uk/Elegant-Puzzle-Systems-Engineering-Management-ebook/dp/B07QYCHJ7V.
2. Several managers are struggling to re-create the ‘watercooler’ conversations in a digital setting, more so due to the lack of the serendipitous discussions, which sometimes lead to brilliant sparks of ideas.
3. One manager gave a great idea — in their team, within a workweek, they force ALL their devs to take a day off of Zoom and calls to focus on their work entirely.
4. Another manager recommended this excellent guide by basecamp to manage effective communication while working remotely — https://basecamp.com/guides/how-we-communicate
5. Amongst the four KPIs mentioned above, one of the CTOs said that they focus on the quality of releases, rather than just the number of releases done.
6. One of the CTOs also mentioned that they measure the “time from ideation to production” and highly recommend “Progressive rollouts”. The golden standard for “time from ideation to production” for them is less than 1 hour!

Stay tuned for the takeaways from our next round table! You can find the links to our round table events here.