What Makes Engineering Organizations Successful
Digging into a simple yet profound question for engineering managers — How do you know if your team is successful?
Let’s delve into this simple yet profound question — How do you know if your team is successful? Since success is fairly contextual and subjective, it's futile to prescribe a set of metrics that work for every engineering team. Instead, this post outlines a practical framework for engineering managers to develop their mental model for understanding what makes their teams successful (or unsuccessful).
Most indicators of success tend to surface up in two principal themes — Outcomes and Engagement.
While outcomes are a direct result of an organization executing its vision, engagement is a valuable proxy for how effectively it's executing. You know the team is successful when it can flourish at creating desirable outcomes consistent with its vision.
Outcomes as a Measure of Success
Determine a Vision
Before defining outcomes and success metrics, stakeholders usually determine a vision (or goals, or charter) for an organization or a team. Once a concept is established, it's easier to elaborate on what desirable outcomes will look like and how to measure them.
Attempting to come up with success metrics or key results in the absence of a broader vision or goal can be just as frustrating as it is futile. In situations like this, engineering managers add value by bringing directional clarity to the table.
Define Outcomes
Outcomes and results for engineering organizations are typically linked to some form of value creation, which is a helpful guardrail when framing outcomes for teams with notable differences in their charters. For example, modern tech companies are composed of dozens to thousands of engineering teams, which all create value in very diverse ways —
The team met all reliability and uptime SLOs for a service or a product during this quarter
The company expanded an existing product to a new market
The org found a product-market fit by building capabilities that customers wanted
Naturally, outcomes and measurements in each of these examples differ greatly based on the team. When building prototypes to validate ideas, you'd want the team to work more flexibly and not spend too much time planning. In contrast, larger organizations with seasoned products skew toward mature engineering processes that have metrics built-in.
Tools and Frameworks
Plenty of tools exist for enabling engineering managers and leaders to define and measure outcomes. While every framework has its shortcomings, I think Objectives and Key-Results (OKRs) is useful for software teams. Ultimately, the correct framework to drive and measure outcomes depends mainly on the organization that you're supporting — it could be anything from OKRs, SLAs, to even revenue, margins, or EPS.
Engagement as a Measure of Success
While employee engagement may not directly map to a company's success in the marketplace, it's still a valuable indicator of how "healthy" an organization is. An organization that delivers stellar outcomes but has a toxic culture that regularly burns out engineers is neither successful nor sustainable — making it ineffective at execution. Turns out, tracking engagement across the organization gives us a good window into how effectively the organization is executing its vision. Here is a brief primer on engagement for engineering managers.
Engagement Dampens or Accelerates Execution
Engaged teams are highly productive, champion the company's culture, and go out of their way to help customers. This is because highly engaged employees are bought into the company's vision, find their work interesting, like their coworkers, and are meaningfully rewarded for their contribution to making the company successful.
A drop in engagement can often be linked to a fractured vision, broken communication channels, flawed processes, a perception of unfairness, no opportunities to grow, etc. Low engagement dampens an organization's performance, meaning it will struggle to produce value no matter how ambitious or well-defined its vision and outcomes are. To make matters worse, low-performing organizations cause engagement to drop even further — creating a vicious cycle.
On the contrary, highly engaged teams can accelerate the execution of a company's vision and increase its odds of finding success in the marketplace.
Engagement is Composite
My favorite part of tracking engagement is that it reflects an astonishing set of variables that affect an organization's execution. Everything from team culture, company vision, strategy, leadership communication, career growth to tech debt, on-call schedules, and sprint ceremonies affect engagement.
The flip side to engagement being a composite signal is plenty of nooks and crannies that can hide organizational problems. For example, Thing A could be applying downward pressure on engagement, and Thing B could be pulling it up — thereby causing no perceptible macro changes. If Thing B is temporary or doesn't scale, engagement will drop as soon as Thing A worsens.
For instance, a team that lacks a culture of candid feedback will eventually develop an undertone of toxicity. There may be some niche and exciting engineering problems that the team gets to work on, allowing it to brush some of that toxicity under the carpet. But as soon as there is a lull, the dormant toxicity will come roaring back and dent the team's engagement.
Tools and Frameworks
Surveys with Likert scale questions are perhaps the most commonly used tool to measure engagement at scale. For smaller teams, one-on-one meetings are a great forum to get a more qualitative signal on engagement. This post from a few weeks ago dives deeper into the various factors that affect engagement of engineering teams.
Companies like Qualtrics and Culture Amp also make some neat software to help engineering managers track hotspots with engagement.
Wrap-up
The answer to How do you know if your team is successful is wrapped in some combination of outcomes and engagement that's unique to the team. Cultivating a culture of transparency around success metrics can empower groups and individuals to make the right decisions and ship impactful software!
