Key takeaways from Engineering Leaders round tables
(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 recently finished two more round tables on the topic of “How to build a high-performing engineering team”. The 3rd round table held on 10th June had Engineering Managers from Singapore and SEA, while the 4th one held on 11th June had Engineering Managers from the UK and Europe. We got some new insights and also noticed some common themes when compared to the previous round tables.
In this instance, we started the round table by mentioning the four major 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. The four main KPIs 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
Several Engineering Managers said that they have indeed used these metrics to measure the performance of their team previously. There were some disagreements about the metric “Deployment Frequency” because of the fear that it might lead to a decrease in quality. The counter-argument was that all these four metrics taken together actually resulted in a high-performing team. In essence, any of these four metrics cannot be considered in a silo, or else, you might end up skewing your performance measurement.
Beyond these four metrics, there were a few other things that came up. There was a consensus that uptime and stability of the code were necessary for all organisations, although it was more so for some — for instance, products in the Fintech or Payment space. Apart from uptime, building a culture of trust and autonomy within their team was also echoed as an essential factor, especially for more mature organisations, which had already embraced a model of Continuous Delivery and had the above 4 KPIs ingrained in their DNA.
Apart from the above, the managers also shared some other exciting tidbits -
- There was almost a unanimous consensus that remote working has increased the productivity of their entire team!
- One of the managers focuses heavily on conducting 1 on 1s, especially with the current situation. He said that he holds 1 on 1s with his team every week or alternate weeks.
- Another manager mentioned that asking the right, unbiased questions to the team was very important. That way, they can introspect and optimise their behaviour and performance.
- One of the companies sometimes sends a delivery of cocktails to their teammates as a gift! (That’s one lucky team!)
- Although remote working has undoubtedly increased productivity, it is also leading to burnout, and fatigue amongst a lot of developers. Managers are keeping a close eye on this area, as remote working is likely to continue at least for a few more months worldwide.
Stay tuned for the takeaways from our next round tables by subscribing to one of our Eventbrite pages —
