Rethink Your Understanding

Transforming Software Delivery

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Finally, Metrics That Help: Boosting Productivity Through Improved Team Experience, Flow, and Bottlenecks.

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13 min read

Note: This article has two parts: First, a view on today’s data insights and metrics. Second, our experience researching the tools in the market.

Data is key to improvement, but it is not just about collecting and reporting it. We must use the right data for the right purpose to improve flow and efficiency, and team health. The way that leadership approaches the metrics ultimately still has the largest impact on success. We can unleash our full potential and reach our goals by adopting a metrics-driven improvement culture and methods that provide insights to encourage and motivate teams.” ~ Phil Clark

What is great software delivery?

To be excellent at delivering software, deliver the right changes efficiently, frequently, with quality, and get customer feedback. Move quickly with the confidence and knowledge that you are building the right things with quality and security. Innovate, Adapt, learn, and solve real customer problems faster than your competition.

What problem are we trying to solve?

Better ways of measuring software delivery performance.
How can we make the most optimal impact? We can assess software delivery team performance with useful metrics that both the organization and team members desire and those that encourage and enable teams to experiment and drive their own improvements. With a continuous improvement mindset, no matter how good we are today, we will get just a little better tomorrow.

Digital Product Workflow

Digital products flow across three primary stages: Product Discovery, Product Delivery, and Operations.

If you are performing value stream management, you create an end-to-end (concept to cash) cross-organizational flow of work for the value stream throughout the organization, understanding both upstream and downstream work and eliminating dependencies, waste, and friction.

End-to-end, Product Discovery, Product Delivery, and Product Operation: All stages of digital product management from idea generation to production or customer use, a.k.a concept to cash.

Product Discovery: The conceptual vetting stage of a digital product, from idea to backlog. Ideation, discussion, evaluation, and consideration for which features or products to prioritize and build to set the stage for increasing organizational performance.

Product Delivery: The delivery stage of a digital product, backlog to production.

Product Operation: The operation and support stage of a digital product.

Product discovery uncovers what creates value, while product delivery produces what creates value.

Measuring engineering performance

How are we doing? What are we doing well? What areas can we improve? What are we getting from our investment?

Measuring engineering performance has historically been a low point of my 20+ year technology career. During the first decade in technology, I was assessed solely as a practitioner by the metrics of that time. I vividly recall the metrics constantly reinforcing the notion of being perceived as a mere cog in a machine and the disheartening label of being a cost center.

As a manager, I was responsible for evaluating the performance of software engineers using the same criteria that I was assessed on as a practitioner. Based on these metrics, I would make decisions regarding individual team members, including stacked ranking. I have experienced the negative impacts on culture, engagement, and adverse side effects stemming from legacy metrics that treated people like machines (individual productivity measures, lines of code, and tracking hours).

Knowledge work is distinct from the repetitive workings of a mere machine.

Avoid measuring individual development activities in your business as it harms team dynamics and productivity; doing so will not help you reach your business goals, making it an ineffective use of time and resources. It is not just about the performance of individuals but all about successful teams. A shift to focusing on team outcomes and capabilities and measuring performance for continuously improving team flow is inspiring. Today’s delivery teams are seeking ways to maximize efficiency and streamline workflows. They can now access meaningful metrics to verify their efforts are paying off. By utilizing these revolutionary team metrics, teams can gain visible insights and signals to enhance their product development and delivery process further.

Whether Flow- or DORA-based, today’s metrics should combine system/process data (quantitative) and self-reported data (qualitative).

We are not the teams of yesterday

Significant influences have shifted how we can instrument and measure engineering performance (IT, digital product delivery) from the past. 

The team’s design has changed: shifting from large, skill-based functional silos that hand off work to the next functional team to small, cross-functional teams that can deliver solutions with the least dependency on other teams.

Capabilities have changed: architecture (microservices, DDD, event-driven, lambda, serverless computing, and more), culture, team design, continuous integration, continuous delivery, cloud strategies, automation, quality practices, SDLC (agile, lean), DevOps, platform engineering, and more.

Systems measures have changed (quantitative): It provides visibility to change the system rather than focusing on the individual people.

Dora Metrics (Product Delivery: Development to Production)

Flow Metrics (Product Discovery and Product Delivery: Idea to Production)

  • Project to Product by Mik Kersten
  • Lean practices and Value Stream Management (VSM) and Flow metrics
  • Platforms: There are several options in the VSM and Flow space, such as Planview Tasktop Viz

Self-reported data around team health and sentiment metrics have improved (it can be both qualitative and quantitative).

People aren’t happy because they’re successful; they’re successful because they’re happy. Happiness is a predictive measure. 1

  • Developer Experience (DX); I recommend and focus on Team Experience (TX)
  • SPACE, a New Framework to Understand and Measure Developer Productivity
  • Platforms: DX (getdx) plus one that focuses on team experience (TX) like TeamRetro or agilityhealth. Most likely, several more in the market should be mentioned here. 

Note: I have no equitable affiliation or endorsement benefits from any of my recommendations

Separate the business from the team conversation

Separating business pressure to drive metrics from a team’s motivation to use metrics for improvement is crucial. Teams that focus on continuous improvement and have visibility into metrics can identify and solve bottlenecks, leading to better outcomes and aligned results with business expectations. Metrics can be imposed by the business, risking gamification, or embraced as tools for team improvement.

Teams need motivating metrics. When teams manage improvement insights, they view the metrics as feedback to provide visibility into areas where they are performing well or where they can improve. They mine for bottlenecks and improve overall flow and outcomes. Despite their imperfections, metrics like these help to evaluate the outcomes that teams produce rather than just focusing on the numbers or outputs of individual contributors. Through monthly reviews, the teams can collaborate and develop ways or experiments to improve the bottlenecks.

How might metrics be viewed differently between the business and the delivery teams?

Business interest (focus in on the numbers): 

  • Are team metrics, the numbers, improving?
  • How can we predict the delivery estimates of a team?
  • Are department metrics improving (aggregate of all teams or portfolios)?
  • What actions are teams taking to improve?
  • Capacity, development cost per product, and return on investment.

Benefits:

  • Team throughput and delivery insights.
  • Time to market.
  • Improved predictability.
  • Delivery performance is an artifact of organization valuation. Over time, this creates a higher-quality system with fewer problems.

Risks: 

  • Pressure for individual metrics. Developers are more than just coders. Overemphasizing individual developer focus can be detrimental to team culture and overall performance. It is the collective effort of teams that delivers software, not the work of individual developers.
  • Organization leaders with a heavy hand push on the numbers. Teams use gamification to drive numbers, please the business for what their company wants to see, and risk limited or no real improvements to throughput.
    • If you still fear team gamification and misuse of metrics that defeat the value of modern ways to measure and motivate efficiency improvement, consider improving your leadership before blaming the tools or teams.
  • Comparing teams, pitting them against one another and the behaviors that arise from this, and knowledge hoarding. Each team’s work is most likely different than other teams’ work, making it difficult to compare.
  • Retention.

Teams view (focus on bottlenecks and conversations):

  • How are we doing? Where and how can we move the needle to improve throughput flow?
  • What areas are we doing well? Why might this be?
  • What are our bottlenecks to flow (what steps in our workflow take the longest time)?
  • What are the current obstacles we face regarding lead time, cycle time, PR time, and failure rate?
  • Where can we reduce waste? Can automation help?
  • What capabilities or practices can we change or add to help us?
  • What types of work need to receive the proper attention?
  • More experienced teams: How do we compare to similar cohorts or cohort clusters in the industry (if this data is available)?

Benefits:

  • Teams have the data insights to highlight underlying bottlenecks.
  • Improved time spent in active states versus wait states.
  • Collaboration and knowledge sharing across teams.
  • Autonomy, teams have meaningful metrics to allow them to solve efficiency problems (address the bottlenecks).
  • Teams use qualitative feedback (sentiment metrics) to encourage conversation, improve collaboration, and reduce toil and friction.
  • Team member engagement and employee retention.

Risks:

  • Focusing on individual team member performance. It has been my experience that small teams will not tolerate underperforming team members over time; if the team can’t solve the concern, they can surface the issue to the individual’s manager. I like using the analogy of a music band. The other band members will recognize an underperforming band member.

Leaders must avoid the outdated mindset of individual metrics, measuring individual productivity and lines of code and having teams compete against one another (comparing teams by metrics). Instead, leaders should focus on metrics that improve team flow and delivery efficiency. These metrics should combine system/process data (quantitative) and self-reported data (qualitative).

“When teams recognize the value of today’s metrics and utilize them to enhance their delivery flow, focusing on the bottlenecks and friction points, the business numbers will naturally follow suit. By embracing this approach, improvements become inherent, allowing the numbers to care for themselves.”

Qualitative Metrics: Developer Experience (DX) versus Team Experience (TX)

Prioritizing workplace happiness is crucial for success as it can lead to improved productivity, innovation, and revenue. It surpasses traditional metrics and should not be considered a perk but a key driver of a more profitable workplace.

Developer experience (DX) has been a hot topic in the technology industry lately. Most organizations build software as teams; I speak for cross-functional teams that consist of developers and other roles necessary to deliver software. Developers construct the code, but the whole team must provide the solution.  I recommend ongoing survey questions for self-reported qualitative metrics centered on developer and team feedback (TX). Earlier in this post, I shared the names of a couple of solution providers.

Team experience (TX) includes day-to-day work delivering work on teams. It encompasses all the different points of friction team members encounter in their work, including the organization’s tools, processes, and culture. Improving TX is critical to the business’s bottom line, as research shows it is a top predictor of engagement, productivity, and satisfaction. Companies with top-quartile team experience outperform their competition regarding productivity and their ability to innovate faster.

Summary on metrics

Effective teams want to improve. By offering teams a clear strategy, including an illustrative map (like a value stream or flow map), and specific expectations of outcomes, they can be afforded autonomy. They will be free to make their own decisions. Additionally, by providing them with team-based metrics that spotlight any bottlenecks in their process, the team members can confidently decide how best to positively improve the overall efficiency and effectiveness of their role in the workflow.

The business still needs to see results. Assuming team autonomy and motivating team metrics, as a business leader, you can step away from the teams and leave them alone to do their best work. You identify leaders to support the team to focus on outcomes and performance. You can focus on aggregating the signals of the metrics that matter to you. There is no “one” metric to gauge efficiency. Combining the feedback from multiple signals before raising concerns would be best. This approach means you don’t have to interrupt people or teams to get them to justify their numbers unless you have concerns. Suppose the data over a more extended period raises concerns. In that case, you can gain an understanding from the team of what might be happening and provide any guidance or action that may help them get back on track, if necessary.

A fresh perspective on performance measurement is emerging in the industry. These metrics focus on optimizing flow across the organization and should provide system and process level data (quantitative data) combined with self-reported health metrics data (qualitative data) to remove negative impacts on team culture. This improves engagement and puts improvement decisions at a team level. With this approach, the entire organization should see gains in optimizing the flow of work and improving delivery outcomes.

Removing the pressure of the business’s view on the team’s metrics is essential to foster confidence and trust that the team can review and act on insights, allowing them to identify areas where they can improve how they deliver software. To better insights and increase team engagement, using system-measurable metrics and regular, consistent surveys capturing teams’ experiences (sentiment) is essential. These visible metrics empower the teams to review and experiment with improvements.

Researching the market

The challenge

As a department leader, I am responsible for equipping our product development and delivery teams with performance feedback and metrics that will provide them with insights they can use to continue improving, even if they are already performing at a high level.

My team and I recently evaluated Value Stream Management (VSM), Flow, and DORA metrics platforms to assess the depth of data visibility into the product discovery and delivery phases and workflows through dashboards. The current market at the time of my writing provides many solution providers boasting different features, focuses, and prices, so it’s essential to do your due diligence before choosing one that fits your organization’s needs best.

Most solution providers focusing on VSM and Flow Metrics serve mid-market and enterprise organizations. In contrast, the solution providers focusing on DORA metrics serve small and medium businesses (SMB) and mid-market organizations. This evaluation experience was rewarding; it generated great conversations with solution providers and within my team and inspired this post.

Selecting a provider and partner

Selecting a metrics tool provider requires thoroughly understanding your organization’s needs, goals, and budget. Although we recommend a solution that covers all stages of the value stream, these options are targeted at enterprise-level budgets. They may not be affordable for SMB and mid-market organizations.

After evaluating the market, we identified two primary categories of metrics tool providers. The first category provides a comprehensive view of the entire value stream and can ingest data from various sources. In contrast, the second focuses on development and delivery, with optics around or extensions of the DORA metrics. We found that VSM metrics platforms tend to target enterprise budgets, while DORA metrics platforms are more affordable for SMBs and mid-market organizations.

We prefer a think big, start small, scale-out approach for most change efforts, as we did with our agile and DevOps transformation and our decision to select a VSM metrics solution provider. If development and delivery are your most significant bottlenecks, start with DORA and local metrics. Otherwise, you can expand to other parts of the delivery planning or discovery optics from value stream management solutions to gain operational efficiencies.

In my selection research, I found that some vendors measure performance and efficiency across the entire flow, while others focus only on one stage, measuring product delivery. However, I did not find one solution that measured both stages well. Additionally, I needed help finding a solution that provided strong team health metrics and qualitative data around human dynamics and team operations, in addition to system measures.

Another critical difference I discovered between service providers was the degree of data integrations or data read access available. While all platforms offer visualizations to identify bottlenecks, some providers do not integrate with systems of record that provide deeper insights into stages and the tasks causing the bottlenecks. When evaluating a solution, consider whether additional metrics are necessary to narrow the bottleneck or which components need to change to improve the bottleneck.

Visualizing the instrumentation options

I created the following diagram to help me convey these concepts when having this conversation with others:

Final thoughts

I am encouraged by the digital product delivery metrics available today that focus on teams’ usage to make decisions to improve performance and efficiency. Two measurements are necessary for teams to have the information they need to succeed: system process performance data and human dynamics, sentiment, and how teams operate.

While some solution providers have been in the market for some time, it was apparent that this market is still relatively young and proliferating with new vendors and improved features from competitors. Your approach to metrics and the degree to which you can visualize data in one solution can be the difference for your team. There are drastic differences in prices and capabilities among these solutions. I suggest you examine how you present flow and optimization across the organization. Select a solution that best fits the context of your teams and organization.

Another exciting aspect: Linking data to business value outcomes and impact (closing the loop). We can quantify the impact of our investments in agile, lean, and DevOps software delivery best practices.

Poking Holes

I invite your perspective to analyze this post further – whether by invalidating specific points or affirming others. What are your thoughts?.

Let’s talk: phil.clark@rethinkyourunderstanding.

Related Posts

References

  1. Sutherland, Jeff; Sutherland, J.J.. Scrum (p. 148). Crown. Kindle Edition

Agile Software Delivery: Unlocking Your Team’s Full Potential. It’s not the Product Owner.

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10 min read

This article examines the role of leadership in agile software delivery teams and product organizations. The Product Owner is often considered a leadership role. This article highlights the importance of having an experienced Scrum Master or Agile Leader as a leader on the delivery team. These individuals bring impartial leadership and provide additional benefits to the delivery ceremonies, ultimately impacting the success of the product delivery.

The article also explores the challenges faced by product and technology teams when working together to deliver software in organizations where these are separate functions. The tension between Product Owners, Scrum Masters, and team members can lead to friction and difficulties in aligning goals. Many articles, posts, and podcasts cover the toil between Product Owners and teams. This article aims to provide an alternative perspective on addressing this issue and offers alternative options for improving collaboration and prioritizing work. The insights provided in this article may help organizations better understand their context and adjust their team’s approach for better outcomes.

Your decision regarding team leadership is critical

If you’re utilizing Scrum, Lean-Agile, Kanban, SAFe, XP, etc. – or if you’ve created your version of these methodologies – the roles of Product Owner and Scrum Master were designed as leadership roles to give teams an advantage in achieving success. For teams that want to develop high-quality software with security and performance protocols factored in, three influential leadership positions are necessary: product owner, agile leader, and engineering manager (or technical lead). The level of engagement between these three leadership roles helps the teams succeed.

The Agile Leader Model. This post assumes the following:

  • Your organization or department embraces Agile, Lean, and DevOps practices tailored to meet your unique needs.
  • Your teams are organized as small cross-functional delivery teams.
  • Your team follows a delivery practice, for example, Scrum, Kanban, Lean-Agile, or any method that suits your context.
  • Features are just one of your focuses. You recognize four types of work that flow through your digital product value stream: feature, debt, defect, and risk.1
  • Most importantly, the Product Owner is a part of the delivery team and regularly participates as a team member. If not, why?

In many product and service organizations and delivery frameworks, the Product Manager or Owner is solely accountable for deciding what the team should focus on. Understandably, the Product Manager and Product Owner are responsible for the organization’s product strategy, delivery, growth, and capabilities. They are under pressure and held accountable by the organization to prioritize products over all else. However, this does not necessarily mean that absolute authority or responsibility belongs to the Product Owner; other factors are also at play.

Roles

Here is a summary of the Product Owner’s responsibility from “The Accountabilities of the Product Owner” from scrum.org as published in November 2020: The Product Owner is a member of the Scrum Team and is responsible for maximizing the value of the product resulting from the team’s work. They provide clarity to the team regarding the product’s vision and goal and work to deliver value to all stakeholders. The Product Owner is accountable for successful Product Backlog management, which includes developing and communicating the Product Goal, creating and communicating Product Backlog Items, ordering them, and ensuring they are transparently understood. They may delegate this responsibility to others on the team but remain accountable for its accomplishment and the value delivered. The Product Owner must also earn the respect of the entire organization to make decisions and get the support they need for those decisions. They are the final decision maker for changes in the Product Backlog and should also be getting customer feedback on the product.

Likewise, the Scrum Master/Agile Leader’s responsibility summary: A scrum master is a coach and facilitator in a scrum team responsible for implementing and guiding the scrum framework. They establish processes, resolve conflicts, protect the team, and facilitate meetings. Agile leaders prioritize people, learning, and adaptability over processes and embody an evolutionary mindset of self-awareness and growth. Two key capabilities are the ability to encourage conversations regarding prioritization and attention to the types of work; the other is encouraging discussions about team improvements through team metrics (system data) and team health (qualitative data). To be an influential scrum master and agile leader, one must be humble, responsive to change, embrace uncertainty, and be willing to evolve themselves and the team systems.

Challenges and Responsibility

The question of who should determine what work to prioritize among the four types required for an effective digital product is essential. While the Product Owner is typically responsible for deciding what a team will work on and deliver, team autonomy can give members a sense of responsibility and the power to make decisions. Autonomous teams must deliver work that benefits the organization and regularly understand needs, performance, and consequences while speaking to the value of each type of work (features, defects, technical debt, and risk) for the organization’s goals and technology. However, accountability for delivery can also fall on the engineering manager if the team structure includes one. The debate over the effectiveness of product owners leading teams, levels of team toil, and the role of Scrum Masters in assisting them is widely discussed in articles, posts, and podcasts.

The Problem

The problem with traditional approaches to work management is a need for balance in decision-making, clarity of roles, and conflicts of interest; there needs to be more common alignment and shared understanding of goals between the team and the organization. This is a human-driven problem, not one with Agile, Lean, or DevOps techniques. In the industrial era, work was predictable, and workers followed orders from managers with little autonomy. In the previous waterfall software development generation, IT served as the customer of the product team or business, with projects managed by project managers but limited purpose and authority for IT workers. This mindset and experience can create difficulties in transitioning to an Agile working method. It may be assumed that the Product Owner initially instructs the team on what to do; however, this approach only works if Agile is implemented with a more collaborative approach, where the team works together to prioritize and allocate work that aligns with organizational and performance goals.

Having the Product Owner decide what the team should work on can be a conflict of interest with the other types of work.

Three key books helped me to shift my mindset, Team of Teams 2, Turn the Ship Around 3, Team Topologies 4.

Teams

Great teams comprise exceptional Product Owners, Agile Leaders, and Technical Leads who can collaborate to achieve remarkable outcomes.

Product and IT teams must work as colleagues, not just customers and suppliers, to deliver solutions to external customers. In this context, I refer to having a small cross-functional team design. The product owner is on the same hierarchical level as developers and other team roles, each drawing on their expertise. The product owner knows the business and customers, while developers are experts in product implementation, performance, quality, and development processes. The production or operations engineer has expertise in cloud solutions, scaling, and cost. By combining their skills and working together as a team, they can allocate and prioritize the four types of work to meet organizational and performance objectives, leveraging the power of social capital.

Skills

Your teams benefit from having T-shaped skillful team members. T-shaped skills are a combination of exceptional competency in one particular field (represented by the vertical line) and an understanding and proficiency in related areas (horizontal line). Your teams should have clear roles and responsibilities around each member’s primary skills (vertical line in T-shaped skills).

Effective teams do not have an “us” versus “them” mentality (product versus technology), wherein one position dictates all work assignments. By creating a balanced team aligned with the organizational and platform investment goals, joint decisions can be made about work prioritization within a set time frame. Collaboration ensures that teams have a clear purpose, an understanding of business and customer needs, unity of goals, and the ability to achieve company objectives successfully. The organization benefits from the team’s prioritized work. To assess team performance:

  1. Consider the impact of your Product Owner and Agile Leader.
  2. If the team is struggling, ask if they have a clear understanding of organizational goals, their work’s impact, and if they are being encouraged to make decisions or kept on a tight leash.
  3. Ensure that the team has a unified understanding of the four essential components of work and that the senior leadership team understands how the team’s prioritization contributes to both short-term and long-term objectives.

A Solution: The Agile Leader

Some organizations that move from waterfall to agile practices have started to overlook the significance of the scrum master role. A misunderstanding or grasp of the role or financial constraints leads organizations to remove this team member, divide the role responsibilities among other positions, or assign different individuals to take turns as the scrum master. I suggest that the Agile Leader (also known as Scrum Master or a similar title) plays a vital role in achieving high-performing teams and exceptional delivery performance based on team structure and work requirements.

Assumptions of your Agile Leader or Scrum Master:

  1. Belonging to a team: You are a permanent member of one or more teams and refrain from frequently switching between teams or floating in and out of them.
  2. Facilitating delivery: You are dedicated to fostering a productive and collaborative environment within your team by coaching, encouraging team practices, promoting psychological safety, and facilitating communication and decision-making.
  3. Improving team performance: You are responsible for continuously evaluating and improving your team’s performance, helping to remove any barriers impeding effective delivery.

As a Product Owner, it is part of your job to be aware of the value behind your product, explain its worth to teams and stakeholders, comprehend and communicate what needs to be accomplished to deliver the product, and undertake many other duties. However, the responsibilities of coaching, motivating work practices, objectively evaluating team health, and driving effective delivery may better fit the role of an Agile Leader, with the Product Owner focused on delivering features. The Technical Leads and Developers focused on technical debt, quality, and risk; the Scrum Master or Agile Leader is the only role free from conflicts of interest and can focus on the team’s health, promote collaboration, identify anti-patterns, resolve conflicts, and encourage team members to solve them. With agile leadership, the potential for conflict of interest is removed.

Good Agile Leaders lead teams.

Agile leaders, coaches, and Scrum Masters strongly understand empathy, giving and receiving feedback, and the human side of our work. They place a high priority on the happiness of their teams. Incorporating it into Scrum, Lean, and Kanban gives you excellent tools, techniques, and leadership skills for managing workflow effectively.

Agile leaders play a crucial role in fostering collaboration and enabling team members to reach their full potential. They are trained to coach, facilitate team conversations, and create a productive environment where everyone feels supported as a product owner, technical lead, quality assurance personnel, or any other role. Effective coaching is a crucial aspect of the Agile leadership role; it aims to empower individuals with confidence and knowledge.

Agile leaders continuously invest in their core abilities. To offer the best advantages to their teams, they focus on cultivating T-shaped skills and learning enough about other teams’ needs and roles. A well-rounded viewpoint comes with expanding one’s knowledge outside of regular practices.

Team Delivery Efficiency

Agile leaders should facilitate processes and take a proactive role in ensuring delivery efficiency. This is achieved by incorporating metrics and practices that monitor and enhance delivery speed and quality. Experienced Agile Leaders help teams identify waste and bottlenecks in delivery and encourage collaboration and conversations to improve flow. They highlight how measuring flow (delivery efficiency) and realization (value impact) ensures you’re building the right things and building them efficiently. Operational efficiency improvements must focus on both. While teams focus on flow (delivery efficiency improvement), Agile Leaders can challenge product management to define and track anticipated outcomes to avoid misalignment with broader goals, ensuring feedback loops in verifying value realization.

Partnership

Skilled Agile Leaders, Product Owners, and Technical Leads are the three foundation pillars of delivery teams. Agile leaders should provide a strong foundation of trust between themselves, the Product Owner, and the Technical Lead by having regular one-on-one meetings with each team member. They can use coaching contracts for these discussions to help them review what the Agile Leader has observed, what the team is saying, and, vice versa, what the Product Owners or Technical Leads have observed. This approach can improve collaboration, prioritization, alignment, and team delivery.

Comparing an Agile leader to the head coach of a football team is a fitting analogy. The Product Owner can be viewed as the offensive coordinator and the Technical Lead as the defensive coordinator. Like head coaches, Agile Leaders must develop strong relationships with their team members and proactively remove obstacles that impede effective delivery. The success of the delivery teams can be correlated to the effectiveness of the Agile Leader in fostering a supportive and collaborative environment and accepting that part of their role is to coach others and teams to become better at what they do.

I created the following picture to illustrate this model:

Underlying image from Apple TV’s Ted Lasso, Warner Bros. TV.

Good Agile Leaders are in tune with team health and keep a team moving forward.

Final thoughts: Providing the team air cover

Suppose you subscribe that the agile leader role, having the least conflict of interest, can guide, arbitrate, and encourage team decisions through collaboration. In that case, Every team still needs a reliable shield to bear the heat when things go wrong. Usually, this is done by a senior leader or an experienced team member with organizational clout. When the team has unity in goals and skills, psychological safety, enjoys their work and sees the purpose in the value they deliver, motivation to grow better, and authority to make their own delivery decisions with someone who always has their back — then you know they are unlocking their full potential.

Poking Holes

I invite your perspective to analyze this post further – whether by invalidating specific points or affirming others. What are your thoughts?.

Let’s talk: phil.clark@rethinkyourunderstanding.

References

  1. Mik Kersten (2018), Project to Product: How to Survive and Thrive in the Age of Digital Disruption with the Flow Framework. IT Revolution Press
  2. Stanley McChrystal, Tantum Collins, David Silverman, Chris Fussel (2015). Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World. Portfolio
  3. L. David Marquet (2013). Turn the Ship Around!: A True Story of Turning Followers into Leaders. Portfolio
  4. Matthew Skelton, Manuel Paris (2019). Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow. IT Revolution Press

The Artistry of Software Engineering: Harnessing Creativity for Impactful Business Solutions

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5 min read

“Software is a great combination of artistry and engineering.” – Bill Gates

As a senior leader and software engineer, I have witnessed the exceptional capabilities of software engineers firsthand. I recently came upon a conversation that software engineers are human. Of course, they are. After catching up on the context for the statement, it centered around measuring individual software engineers and how older physical production line measures were morphed into earlier attempts to measure engineers’ performance. Hopefully, organizations treat all employees as humans in their approach to performance and culture. The role is not distinguished by the fact that the workers are human or non-human but rather by the need for problem-solving skills, creativity, and experimenting and managing unknowns.

Software development differs significantly from traditional manufacturing processes, such as car production or house building, where the end product is well-defined and established. In software development, there is inherent uncertainty and the need to manage unknowns, aptly described by the Cynefin framework1. Whether your software development and delivery lifecycle is more function-based and waterfall, cross-functional and agile, lean, or a combination thereof, it is not uncommon for scope creep to occur. Could this be due to consistent learning and uncovering of unknowns throughout development? Understanding how we look at software engineering work and measure software engineers’ performance and return on investment in a company is important.

Unfortunately, many organizations still rely on traditional productivity measures that treat engineers like factory workers churning code. This viewpoint is flawed, as software engineers are skilled problem-solvers who creatively craft elegant solutions. Software engineers are more akin to artists than factory workers. Just as we would not evaluate a painter’s worth by the number of brushstrokes or paintings they create, it is crucial to understand that assessing a software engineer’s productivity extends far beyond the lines of code they produce.

The Human Side of Software Engineering

I agree that it’s important to acknowledge that software engineers are not machines but human beings. By recognizing their human side, we can better understand what drives their creativity and passion. Software engineering is a unique mix of art and science that requires technical expertise, problem-solving abilities, and a keen sense of intuition. A software engineer must balance constraints and opportunities to deliver a functional or visually appealing solution like an artist.

Each software engineer brings a unique approach to implementing solutions, and addressing problems, informed by their experiences, knowledge, and innate talents. This diversity of thought and process makes the field dynamic and exciting, ultimately driving innovation and business growth.

Creating Impactful Software and Fostering Team Satisfaction

In software engineering, team satisfaction is closely tied to creating and shipping products that make a tangible difference. Teams feel a sense of pride and accomplishment when they see their work in the marketplace, positively impacting users and solving real-world problems.

Streamlining the process of shipping software can raise team engagement and enjoyment. This involves providing the right tools, support, automation, and environment to help engineers transform their ideas into reality. Capturing and sharing data-driven insights that motivate teams to improve by identifying bottlenecks is also important. A culture of safety, open communication, and collaboration can help teams navigate challenges more effectively and create more impactful software.

The Importance of Developer Experience for Business Success

A crucial aspect of software engineering that often goes overlooked is the “developer experience.” Generally, developer experience refers to the environment, tools, and culture in which software engineers work. Fostering a positive “developer experience” is vital for nurturing the growth and creativity of these talented individuals.

A supportive and engaging workplace can make all the difference in enabling software engineers to explore new ideas, experiment with different techniques, and ultimately create innovative solutions that drive business value. Conversely, a stifling or uninspiring environment can impede creativity and hinder progress.

Measuring Productivity – A Business-Centric Perspective

To evaluate software engineering productivity honestly, we must move beyond basic measures like counting lines of code or completed tasks. Instead, we should consider an engineer’s work’s overall impact on the business. Depending on your organization’s team structure, team metrics may be more valuable than individual metrics. New methods and practices are available for measuring team productivity and efficiency that don’t focus solely on individual performance. Consider shifting your focus from individual productivity to individual performance. Some factors to consider when assessing a software engineer’s performance might include the following:

  1. The quality of the code produced – Is it efficient, scalable, and maintainable?
  2. Collaboration and communication – Does the engineer work well with their team, fostering innovation, sharing and receiving feedback, and team member support?
  3. Adaptability and growth – Is the engineer continuously learning, adapting, and refining their skills to stay ahead in the competitive landscape?

Conclusion

Software engineering is not merely a routine job on a production line. Instead, it involves a complex and imaginative process that requires a combination of technical proficiency and artistic flair. If businesses appreciate the crafting aspect of software engineering, provide a supportive environment for developers, and emphasize producing and delivering purposeful software, they can unleash the full potential of these skilled individuals and empower them to come up with innovative creations.

References:

  1. Cynefin Framework. https://thecynefin.co/about-us/about-cynefin-framework/

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