Balancing Speed and Quality in Product Development

This is Part 2 of our Top 10 Challenges series! In this episode, we’re focusing on three common team challenges that eng leaders face: how to increase velocity without losing quality, measure productivity & create meaningful metrics, and work cross-functionally with other teams. We identified these challenges based on conversations with hundreds of eng leaders from podcast episodes, ELC events, and more. For this ep, we’ve pulled insights from various eng leaders, including Richard Wong @ enrich, Fatemah Alavizadeh @ Notion, Andrew Fong @ Prodvana, Randall Koutnik @ Jellyfish, Abi Noda @ DX, Barbara Nelson @ InfluxDB, Laura Fay @ L Fay Associates, and Jeremy Henrickson @ Rippling.

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SHOW NOTES:

• Increasing Velocity (Without Losing Quality): Understanding the speed vs. quality dilemma w/ Richard Wong (0:58)
• Defining velocity & its impact on users’ ROI w/ Fatemah Alavizadeh & Andrew Fong (6:17)
• Measuring Productivity and Creating Meaningful Metrics: What drives productivity & makes for meaningful metrics w/ Randall Koutnik (11:31)
• The DevEx framework for improving developer productivity w/ Abi Noda (21:02)
• Working Cross-Functionally with Other Teams: Why it’s important to have cross-functional excellence between eng & product w/ Barbara Nelson & Laura Fay (26:28)
• Cross-functional communication strategies for addressing misaligned priorities w/ Jeremy Henrickson (37:13)

LINKS AND RESOURCES

• Speed vs. Quality with Richard Wong
• How to Create Sustainable Velocity in Your Team with Fatemeh Alavizadeh and Andrew Fong
• Banish Bad Management with Metrics that Don't Suck with Randall Koutnik
• The next evolution to measure & improve developer productivity & experience with Abi Noda
• Bridging the Divide: Strategies for Cross-Functional Excellence between Engineering and Product Management with Barbara Nelson and Laura Fay
• Align & Scale Engineering AND Product with Jeremy Henrickson

This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team:

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/