How should you view your engineering productivity efforts?
Let’s think about your eng-prod efforts on two levels.
Organizationally and individually.
Organizational changes for large sweeping improvements to developers at large
and
changes to individual teams to address productivity problems specific to each development team.
Right now, the trend is to improve developer productivity organizationally.
Things like, internal developer portals (IDPs), tracking productivity metrics (DORA), global developer surveys, etc.
These absolutely will affect how developers write software in the organization.
But!
There is a neglected side to improving engineering productivity.
The individual team.
For engineering managers leading a single team of developers, there is still so much you can do to affect positive change.
Just because your organization hasn’t adopted a DevEx or Developer Platform strategy doesn’t mean that you can’t start understanding and removing developer friction.
Some things may be outside of your control, like external dependencies, inter-team interactions, or lack of direction.
There is still so much you can do to increase the production on your team.
I say it all the time, ask your devs where the friction is, and listen.
You could have been operating on an untrue assumption.
Generate a list of issues and include them in coming up with solutions.
Prioritize those solutions and go to bat for them when these priorities are challenged.
You might be saying “Sounds nice, but we don’t have time for productivity improvements with our tight release deadlines.”
Well…
Timelines for everyone are tight. But creating some breathing room for your developers is worth it.
It’s the difference between keeping your head just above water and actually getting ahead.
Even if it was just doing a better job at planning or fighting scope creep or refusing to accept new tech debt.
Every little bit makes a difference.
You might even find that there are opportunities to 2x production…or 3x….or 5x??
Reply with your thoughts.
Best,
Andre