Key takeaways from Engineering Leaders round table

(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)

Yesterday, we hosted yet another round table for Engineering Leaders from the UK and Europe on the topic “How to build high-performing engineering teams”. We had participants joining in from UK, Germany, Spain and Portugal for this exclusive round table. The companies represented were from a variety of sectors, including mobile games, e-commerce, travel, and lifestyle!

We started the round table by referring to the fantastic talk given by Brian Zotter, who is the VP of Engineering at Medium Engineering. You can find a summary of that talk in our earlier blog post mentioned above.

Key takeaways from this session -

• To begin with, a few swore by the book “Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps!”. They mentioned that they follow the 5 KPIs mentioned in this book to measure the performance of their engineering teams. You can find the link for the book here.
• Speed of delivery and rapid release cycles — a few participants echoed the fact that they consider the speed of delivery of features and the number of times the developers release to production as an essential metric. They also look at the number of times your releases fail in production.
• For others, it is vital to find “proxies” for high performance because it might not be feasible to measure solely based on the rapid release cycles due to the inherent nature of their product, while also being in a highly regulated market. Along with productivity, it is also essential to measure the comfort and happiness of the team!
• Trusting your team — Another fact mentioned by several participants was the need to trust your team deeply. Also important to note is that the trust needs to go both ways — the team also needs to trust their manager(s).
• It is also essential to create a certain level of autonomy in the team and empower them in their day to day tasks.

In summary, the metrics used by some of the leading technology companies to measure the performance of their development teams are — the speed of delivery, release cycles, time to production, happiness and morale of the developers!

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