How can you enhance developer productivity while maintaining development velocity?
The benefits sound great: faster feature delivery, higher retention, engineering efficiency, lower tech debt, and so on.
But dedicating engineers to that means they are not writing code.
How can you do both???
Perhaps you need to reframe your thinking.
Instead of treating developer productivity and product delivery as separate issues, what if they were combined?
What if you planned developer improvements into your product delivery?
Here are a few ideas that have worked for other companies:
- Quarterly hack-a-thon sprints dedicated to innovation.
- Off-sprints, where some engineers get to catch up on documentation, upskilling, or tech debt. This is a time to “take a breath” from the grind of feature delivery.
- Regular collaboration sessions to identify friction points (and then prioritize the solutions). [this one has many benefits]
None of this is rocket science, but it does feel risky.
The fact of the matter is that inefficiencies exist that are holding your developers from delivering their best.
Ignoring the problem won’t make it go away.
Once you begin to solve these issues, you will start to see the future in a whole new light.
A world where your developers are delivering features faster than ever…
innovation is through the roof…
and they’re enjoying it!
Win/Win/Win
Best,
Andre