How to build a high-performing Engineering Team

Yesterday, I had the pleasure to moderate one of our tech round table discussions with Engineering & Product Leaders from London. For all of you that couldn’t make it, this blog post summarizes what we discussed!

We started the round table by referring to a talk given by Brian Zotter, VP of Product Engineering at Medium, at the Elevate conference in 2019. He talks about what makes a high-performing Engineering Team. You can find it here.

What is a high-performing engineering team?

Brian defines it as a team which focuses on

Maximizing long-term, sustainable velocity

Here, “Velocity” is defined as the value delivered to customers over time.

How to build a high-performing engineering team?

Brian mentions that he believes in three aspects -

1. Love your people — appreciate them for the good job that they are doing, care about them.
2. Principles vs processes — take time to make sure that your engineers understand the mission and objectives, why they are building the product. He suggests that you should be clear about what you are “measuring” — is it the lines of code, is it the number of tickets and feature requests completed? You need to define it in detail for your organization and also for your team.
3. Be passionate — as an Engineering leader, we need to be passionate about what we are doing. Our passion and the drive reflects in the team and subsequently, their performance.

Points of discussion -

(These were the points put forth by the participants in the round table)

• We need to consider velocity along with the impact a team has on the business. How would you compare a hard-working and ‘productive’ team that has a product which generates $500,000 in sales versus a team that works on a product which produces hundreds of millions in revenue?
• Break down the tasks and the features to the smallest possible chunk. This way, it is easier to measure things accurately. It could be achieved by speaking to the more experienced developers in the team and taking their help to sub-divide the tasks and the feature requests
• “You can only manage what you can measure”¹. As a manager, you need to decide which factor to use in order to “incentivize” the developers. For example, if you start incentivizing them for time spent in the office, that would create a culture in your team where people focus more on presenteeism as opposed to focusing on productivity.
• You could understand the value of the efforts being done by a team by measuring the revenue or usage by the customers.
• In a high-performing team, alignment between the developers and the stakeholders is essential. Communication plays a vital role to achieve this.
• “Hero culture” is damaging in a team. This refers to the recurring tendency to fix the work of other people, usually at the last minute. In these situations, the “heroes” often hog all the limelight, and it might be demotivating to the other developers in the team.
• Developers taking ownership of the features are also essential and helps both the team and the stakeholders to see and measure the impact.

(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 the top technology companies across Europe! You can find the next blog post here)

Slack group — You can also join our Slack group where you can interact with other Engineering Leaders here.

References —

1. Geller, E. “Leadership Lessons for OSH Professionals.” Professional Safety, vol. 61, no. 6, American Society of Safety Engineers, June 2016, p. 63.