Your team is too busy. You want to get more things done. 3 Phases of High-performing Engineering Cultures

How is your team doing? Explore industry trends enriched with insights from coaching about low, mid and high performing teams

Photo by Florian Schmetz on Unsplash

Vision setting

Let’s split teams into three groups: Low performers, Mid performers and High performers. Since you are reading this after spotting the title, you likely fall into the middle area, growing or declining.

Your company is unique. Your team is unique. Your leadership style is unique. But your engineering culture will have one of two symptoms that I see in almost all cases with my coaching clients:

• One team improving too fast, leaving everyone else behind in standards

• The standard being too low, causing all teams to slowly decline further

I will address both in this article, leaving you with insights that you can think about for inspiration, apply immediately or DM me for a follow-up.

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Opinion tiers for comparison

This is my opinionated analysis from my 15 years of experience as tech lead and engineering coach having worked with my teams very closely. I made a presentation about this a year ago with the wonderful team from Tech Excellence if you want more detail.

Low Performing Teams

Standards are not defined, individuals stand out.

• Have no quality expectations

• Do not write tests

• Build confidence from following a plan

• React with high intensity to operational issues

• Triage maintenance and support

• No defined bar for quality

• Time and money on most activities is inefficiently

• Utilisation for short-term gains

Mid Performing Teams

Quality expectations and processes are defined on an individual basis, but not adopted across the entire org or teams.

• Quality is up to each individual

• Recent and more senior hires write more tests

• Maintainers and long-lime leads incentivised to test-less operations

• Confidence is built on group affiliation and amount of individual autonomy

• Teams are a mix of low and high individual performers, creating friction

• The bar for quality different across each team, module, subsystem

• Debt is handed off from low performers to high performers

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High Performing Teams