Episode 30: Measuring productivity with Laura Tacho
Sep 14, 2024
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Laura Tacho, CTO at DX and a coach to engineering leaders, shares her insights on developer productivity. She explores the crucial differences between leadership and management, emphasizing the need for strong leadership skills. Tacho introduces a new productivity measurement framework that categorizes success into speed, quality, effectiveness, and impact. She encourages prioritizing continuous improvement over mere assessment and highlights the importance of developer surveys for gauging team sentiment. Essential advice for new managers navigating former peer relationships is also covered.
Understanding the difference between leadership and management is essential for aspiring managers to effectively guide their teams and enhance overall performance.
Balancing quantitative metrics with qualitative insights allows managers to evaluate team dynamics comprehensively, fostering a culture of continuous improvement and accountability.
Deep dives
Leadership vs. Management Skills
The distinction between leadership and management is crucial for professionals aiming to transition from individual contributors to managing teams. Leadership involves influencing and inspiring others without direct authority, while management focuses on overseeing tasks and delivering results. Many individuals overlook the need to cultivate leadership skills before entering formal management roles. Understanding this differentiation can help aspiring managers adapt and apply their abilities across various contexts, ultimately fostering greater success.
Coaching and Mentorship as a Superpower
Embracing the role of coach and mentor can be a significant career development opportunity for managers. Many leaders may develop informal coaching relationships unintentionally through their daily interactions, often without realizing their impact. Acknowledging and leaning into this skill can lead to rewarding experiences that enhance both personal growth and the development of others. Building long-term relationships with mentees demonstrates the value of coaching, fostering growth through collaborative learning and support.
Setting Clear Expectations to Avoid Micromanagement
One of the key challenges for managers is the ability to set clear expectations to prevent drifting into micromanagement. When expectations are vague, it can lead to confusion and frustration, which often results in leaders becoming overly involved in day-to-day tasks. By articulating clear objectives at the outset, managers empower their teams and encourage autonomy, reducing the need for constant oversight. This approach nurtures a healthy balance between support and independence, fostering a more productive and engaged work environment.
Measuring Team and Individual Performance
Effective performance measurement requires a balance between quantitative metrics and qualitative insights to reflect both team dynamics and individual contributions. Using established frameworks helps create a holistic view of team performance, allowing managers to identify areas for improvement rather than relying solely on individual output. Metrics should focus on overall system performance while ensuring fairness and clarity in evaluating individual roles. By establishing clear expectations and aligning metrics with organizational goals, managers can facilitate continuous improvement and accountability.
Laura is not only a coach to engineering leaders but also the CTO at DX, a company focused on improving developer productivity. But Laura has been talking about development metrics for a lot longer, and in this episode, we dive deep into the latest research, concrete measures for development teams and their managers, and more!
Guest Biography
Laura Tacho is CTO at DX, a developer experience company. She’s been building developer tools and working on improving developer productivity for over 10 years, all the way from the heyday of IaaS and PaaS on cloud, through Docker and containers, CI/CD, and now as part of DX. She’s also an executive coach for engineering leaders and an expert in building world-class engineering organisations that consistently deliver outstanding results. Laura has coached CTOs and other engineering leaders from startups to the Fortune 500, and also facilitates a popular course on metrics and engineering team performance.