Human perception is almost magical. Only as I started caring about cooking did I start noticing depths in food. It was after I became interested in clothing that I became aware of what people chose to wear daily. After we “boot up” some knowledge, we start realizing it, but others, those who never “take the red pill,” remain unaware. The same happens with tech organizations: if you’ve never experienced a remarkable one, you might not know what you’re missing. Here are some things to evaluate to ensure you don’t let anything too major happen in your “blind spots.”
People
You might be thinking that your team, as it is, is quite good. But many times, we’re not realizing how much better things could’ve been:
Hiring: The best teams also attract people more easily. How hard do you have to work to fill a position? Are you getting the right type of people? It could also be that your pipeline is failing to convert the best people due to myriad reasons.
Growth: I’ve written at length about the vast differences between organizations that help their people grow and those that hope for spontaneous improvement. Can you genuinely say that 90% of your people are tangibly growing and improving? For example, would you say that 90% are noticeably better than they were a year ago? And how much better? I know companies that spend a year “implementing” some Jira workflow changes and are content with that, whereas for others, that would be a matter of a couple of days.
Headcount: Relatedly, when the team isn’t growing enough and when you’re failing to hire the right people, you end up needing more people to deliver the same amount of work. What might feel like a minimal bare-bones team will be overkill for others. Instagram, WhatsApp, and Telegram all had a dozen or so engineers when they reached hundreds of millions of users.
Culture: If you’ve never been part of a team that’s egoless and open, you might not be able to imagine how fast and nourishing discussions can be. Healthy, blameless arguments that help the team reach better solutions faster, as opposed to having to walk on eggshells for any little bit of feedback. How openly does your team speak up?
Tech Mastery
Engineering teams don’t have to be the best in the world to unlock tenfold improvements over the competition. Being aware of the business needs and the changes in the industry is often enough to place you at the top.
Tech Stack: With the rest of the changes happening, most teams will make some bad decisions along the way. However, genuinely senior engineers have a better track record when it comes to making these decisions. They have fewer cases where the entire ecosystem seems to vanish after the company has invested months in an expensive transition. Are you still paying the price of some niche decisions, like having to convince potential hires that learning Scala makes sense for their careers?
Opportunities: Engineers connected with the industry and happenings around them become founts of tech innovation. They see what new APIs Apple announced at WWDC or some interesting story on Hacker News and can translate that into an opportunity for the company. Those technical advancements go unnoticed in many companies, especially by product people who don’t even know what to look for.
Plane of possibilities: When we understand more deeply the tools at our disposal and how the entire system works, we can find different ways of reaching the same goal. If everyone on your team always has the same estimation and approach to delivering a big feature, you’re suffering from a lack of diversity and a team that’s lacking in creativity.
Delivery
Lastly, there’s just how well the team is shipping software that works and how much better that is in the top organizations out there.
Cycle time: Very simply, what you deem as good velocity might be nothing for others. I’ve repeatedly seen top talent engineers deliver in a couple of weeks what their colleagues said would require months. The worst part is that when you have no top engineers in your company, you’ll never find out.
Healthy pushback: Delivering faster sometimes just boils down to the team’s ability to push back on the requirements and help trim them down or change them completely while still achieving the same business goals. This is connected to tech mastery but also to having a team with enough product/business thinking that it can constructively challenge assumptions and freely communicate with its peers.
Quality and customer satisfaction: You’ll never find a team that has no bugs, but even here, your bar might be set way too low. How often should issues occur? How major are they? How long does it take to recover? This is also connected to the experience of your users. One can sense when the product is made well, for example, when it is responsive and behaves as expected.
Taking all of these into account, is your team really all that good? These areas of introspection will also go very well with the yearly tech executive assessment described here.