Developing and improving Engineering Capability

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Introduction

Over a series of blogs I aim to distil my experience of setting up and leading cross geographical, high performing engineering and product teams and the strategies which an organization can adapt to continuously develop and improve their engineering capability.

Experience has been a formidable teacher, and in this endeavor, I draw not only from my own journey spanning over two decades but also from the collective wisdom gained through the experiences of peers, mentors, and advisors. The heart of this exploration lies in the ability to glean lessons, particularly from the mistakes that invariably accompany the pursuit of innovative paths.

I hope you will find value in these articles.

Intended Audience

These articles should be relevant for all aspiring and experienced senior and executive leaders as well as engineering managers who are responsible for managing product lead or pure play engineering teams.

Other Posts in this series

Engineering Excellence

Strategic Excellence: Nurturing Long-Term Value in Engineering Teams

Great engineering teams understand how their work contributes to the overall organizational goals and strategies. They are data driven. They know why they exist (mission and vision) and they know to define and measure the success using objective metrics. They understand how their key metrics contribute to the success of the strategic goals at an organization level (e.g. driving down cancellation rates leads to higher life time value of customers) and they obsess over improving them.

Engineering Teams’ long-term value to a company is opening up new avenues of potential balanced with the short-term mission of continued execution on the product and organisational roadmap¹.

For most part they operate independently, choosing to setup their own roadmap and initiatives with the buy-in from executive stakeholders and senior leadership. Their roadmaps are a blend of operational excellence initiatives, long-term investments in improving their system architecture and security posture as well as initiatives that drive near-term improvements to their key metrics thus enabling concrete business outcomes.

Great Engineering Teams continuously work on minimising their operational burden. They build for the future while balancing near-term Return on Investment (ROI) for their stakeholders.

How do you setup a Great Engineering Team?

You can break it down into two fundamental documents that should be in place which serves as a team’s foundational setup as well as their guiding philosophy.

1. Vision and Mission Document (or a Team Charter)

This document explains “why this team exists”. It may start with a key customer or business problem (e.g. — We exist to increase the retention rate of our customers) or a broad generic mission (e.g. — We exist to improve the experience of our customers).

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Depending on your organisation’s processes, this “Team Charter” might be a single one liner statement in a power point or a 2–6 pager document that goes into detail of the mission and vision as well as the team’s operational mechanisms, including how they take decisions when faced with conflicting choices.

Do make sure that the mission and vision of the team gives them a runway of at least a few years.

This is important for two reasons

• Maximise the ROI for the team — Setting up a team is a significant cost for the organisation and a commitment for the people who join the team. A new team takes its time to become productive as people find their operating rhythm and working cadence with each other.

The framework developed by Bruce A. Tuckman in the 1960s explains the 5 key stages that a team goes through as — Forming, Storming, Norming, Performing, Adjourning. Each stage can last from weeks to months depending on the newness of the people working together to the team or to the organisation. As the team reaches the Norming and then Performing phase, it is in the best interest for the organisation and the team to prolong these stages and minimise the others. A team in constant flux or state of change will instead end up minimising the norming and performing phases while maximising the others and thus have a greater cost compared to its ROI.

• Provide growth opportunities for the people — A team with an extended runway provides the opportunities for its members to hone their craft and attain growth in their careers. A team with a long running charter provides ample time for its team members to collect ample deliverables and body of work that can be presented as promotion supporting artefacts to organisation’s talent and promotional bodies.

2. Objective Success Criterion for the team — It is important to have clear metrics that measure when a team is achieving its mission and vision. These metrics should ideally tie to a north star goal that the wider organisation or the company has so the team has a clear line of sight of their continued success directly enables a tangible organisation or company wide goal.

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For e.g. for a team focused on customer retention a clear metric to track is the number of cancellations of their subscription. By actively undertaking work that reduces the number of cancellations, the team can not only measure their success objectively but also understand clearly how their work leads to overall commercial outcomes.

Once a set of key success metrics are established, the team should be at liberty to autonomously plan and execute on initiatives that moves the needle in the right direction on their key metrics.

This creates a culture of autonomous, self-sufficient team that adopt experimentation at their core to continuously drive for success which they can objectively measure.

The key desirable traits of great engineering teams

These are some of the key desirable traits that a great engineering team embodies.

1. Code Quality, Performance, and operational excellence have owners and guard rails within the team. They measure their engineering productivity using objective metrics such as DORA or similar and obsess over improving themselves.
2. They have minimal inter dependencies between teams and code basis.
3. They have clear accountability within the teams and fewest decision makers.
4. They have clear measure of their success, how their success contributes to overall organisation success, and they obsess over improving them.
5. They create and own their roadmaps autonomously which align with top-level roadmaps and iterate periodically over their roadmaps to ensure relevancy and “mass” (more on this later in a blog post).
6. They have the right mix of talent in the team that provides growth opportunities for newcomers while having sufficient senior oversight for the right engineering decisions.
7. They build for future while balancing quick ROI to their stakeholders.

Two Main Axis that feed into of Engineering Capability

There are two main axis that influence the development and quality of engineering teams within an organisation.

1. Skills, tools, and practices

2. Organisational Setup and Culture

Each of these can be further broken down into constituent parts that shape the overall quality of the teams. I will explore these in the next blog posts.

Summary

In this blog post we establish what a great engineering team does, how it is setup to have a long running charter on which it can execute autonomously and some of the key desirable traits that the team has. In the next article we will delve into the factors (skills, tools, practices, cultures, organisation setup) that enables the formation and continuous improvement of engineering capability in a company.

1. https://lethain.com/first-ninety-days-cto-vpe/