Speed v. Quality, Measuring Productivity & Cross-Functional Relationships - Tackling the Top 10 Eng Leadership Challenges! #186
Jul 9, 2024
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Richard Wong, an experienced engineering leader, discusses challenges like increasing velocity without sacrificing quality, measuring productivity, and working cross-functionally with other teams. Insights from various eng leaders are shared, emphasizing the importance of aligning team goals with higher-level objectives and focusing on measurable outcomes. The podcast also explores the significance of clear requirements, transitioning responsibilities, and fostering healthy team collaboration.
Balancing speed and quality is crucial in engineering processes for optimal system performance.
Utilizing meaningful metrics beyond traditional measurements enhances team collaboration and value delivery.
Effective cross-functional partnerships in engineering require clear communication, shared priorities, and understanding each other's roles.
Deep dives
Engineering Leadership Conference 2024 Overview
The ELC annual 2024 conference provides a platform for engineering leaders to learn from over 40 industry experts, gain insights from peer leaders through roundtable discussions, build lasting relationships, and reignite their passion for engineering leadership. The conference focuses on addressing the top challenges faced by engineering leaders, such as balancing speed and quality in product delivery, measuring productivity, creating meaningful metrics, and enhancing cross-functional partnerships.
Balancing Speed and Quality in Engineering Processes
The podcast delves into the challenge of balancing speed and quality in engineering processes. Drawing parallels with a traffic system, the discussion highlights the need for a system that optimizes both speed and safety. It emphasizes the importance of evolving systems to adapt to changing business needs, as demonstrated through Coursera's journey in maintaining this balance during different company phases.
Measuring Productivity with Meaningful Metrics
The episode underscores the importance of utilizing meaningful metrics to measure productivity in engineering teams. It critiques traditional metrics like the number of Jira tickets closed and advocates for a comprehensive assessment that considers factors like issue cycle time, frequency of shipping to production, change failure rate, and time to resolution. The emphasis on a holistic approach to performance measurement aims to foster team collaboration and delivery of value.
Enhancing Cross-Functional Partnerships in Engineering and Product Management
The discussion highlights strategies for fostering effective cross-functional partnerships between engineering and product management teams. It emphasizes the necessity of clear communication, shared priorities, and a deep understanding of each other's roles and responsibilities. By aligning priorities and addressing potential misalignments, teams can enhance collaboration, improve decision-making, and drive successful product development.
Initiating Product Management and Engineering Alignment
Efforts to align product management and engineering focus on enhancing understanding and empathy between the teams. Initiatives include testing product managers' understanding of engineering constraints, creating shared priority lists, and promoting open communication to bridge any disconnects. Additionally, shared decision-making processes enable effective collaboration and streamline decision outcomes for optimized product development.
Addressing Challenges in Transitioning Responsibilities
Addressing challenges when transitioning responsibilities involves seeking context from departing team members, engaging individual discussions with team members to identify pressing issues, and consolidating feedback to prioritize tasks effectively. Individual conversations foster trust and aid in understanding critical areas requiring attention for seamless continuity in operations.
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.
ELC Annual is our 2 day conference bringing together engineering leaders from around the world for a unique experience help you expand your network and empower your leadership & career growth.
Don't miss out on this incredible opportunity to expand your network, gain actionable insights, ignite new ideas, recharge, and accelerate your leadership journey!
And use the exclusive discount code "podcast10" (all lowercase) for a 10% discount
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)
