devopsy.kinsta.cloud

Author: Brian Park

  • A Developer’s Guide to Building Healthy Teams

    A Developer’s Guide to Building Healthy Teams

    To build a great software product, teamwork must extend across developers, managers and executives. Everyone needs to understand each role’s value–you can’t have an effective team without a good coach and vice versa. It takes a culture built on empathy, trust and shared responsibility with the right amount of ambition and personal connection to make the dream work.

    It isn’t easy to achieve this balance, but here are some tips to help your team become healthier and more effective.

    Watch out for Knowledge Silos 

    When too much unique knowledge is stored in one person’s brain, your ability to get things done depends on their capacity, which can jeopardize the team and the entire organization. Some silos can be good, but only when everyone on the team knows what’s in each one and how to access the information. 

    Knowledge silos can take several forms: 

    • Technical skills, like being the only one on the team to know Go or Python.
    • Ancillary knowledge in some field, like a background in statistics.
    • Historical knowledge, like a developer who has been there from the beginning and knows the whole codebase. 
    • Institutional knowledge, like understanding larger business and project strategy and the history of the company. 

    There are some great hacks for overcoming knowledge silos. Simple awareness of who is good at what–or what background everyone has–is a great place to start. Leaders can then think creatively about team collaboration like pair programming or assigning pull requests based on each individual’s knowledge. Pushing each developer to assess their own silos can help set the team up for better knowledge sharing during impromptu sessions or scheduled meetings. Prioritizing documentation is a good way to ensure developers share what they know. Additionally, using brown bags and demos can help your developers hone their teaching skills. These strategies are a great way of investing in your team’s future velocity.

    Focus on the Individuals That Make up the Team

    Fast Company published a great article about the different personality types that make up a great team:

    • The brain pushes others to take action in pursuit of a goal.
    • The voice gets the big picture and motivates the team.
    • The sharp eye focuses on details to get things done the right way.
    • The heart promotes community, consensus and collaboration.

    Thinking about these four very different traits and identifying who plays each role on your team can help you build a harmonious group—while ensuring the strengths of each individual are emphasized and appreciated. 

    Foster Empathy and Build Trust

    Having empathy for your team often means finding a balance between the desire to win or hit certain goals and understanding the different needs of each teammate. As a manager, you should push yourself to ask thoughtful questions that put you in your developers’ shoes. 

    Empathy builds trust. So does:

    • Supporting developers at their unique levels.
    • Nurturing a culture of healthy sprints and personal well-being.
    • Using data–and not just a gut feeling–as a starting point for improvement
    • Clearing roadblocks to productivity so that teams don’t feel overloaded.
    • Granting autonomy to individual contributors.
    • Consistently accomplishing goals as a team.
    • Being transparent with challenges the team is facing.
    • Sharing data across the organization.

    Things that tend to erode trust include:

    • Stack-ranking developers based on lines of code.
    • Rallying around ambitious deadlines at the expense of burnout. 
    • Using data to demean your team members. 
    • Enforcing a productivity quota.
    • Managing with a top-down perspective.
    • Limiting data to leadership.

    These tips help teams avoid burnout, which is a surefire way to wreck a team. The World Health Organization (WHO) defines burnout as “a syndrome conceptualized as resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed.” So this isn’t just an individual’s personal problem–burnout is a sign that something is wrong within your organization. 

    Understanding knowledge silos, emphasizing individual strengths, cultivating empathy and building trust are the foundations of a strong developer team. Once you have those covered, you’ll be on your way to healthier, more effective teams.

  • How to Manage and Engage Remote Engineering Teams

    How to Manage and Engage Remote Engineering Teams

    As engineering teams look to remain remote or hybrid, executives need to fundamentally change how these teams are managed. After tackling the tactical aspects of a distributed workforce—like home office equipment, a comfortable space where employees can get work done and reliable meeting, calendar and communication tools—more nuanced issues come into play.

    Before the COVID-19 pandemic, when a minority of engineering team members worked remotely, those team members knew that they needed to make a concerted effort to connect and to be part of the group. When the majority are remote, however, the expectations of offsite employees have shifted dramatically. For organizations that had built their business with an in-person team, this brings up entirely new questions of communication, culture, loyalty, problem-solving and retention to the forefront.

    Fundamentally Shifting Engineering Team Structure

    Inspiring change requires fundamental shifts in the ways engineering teams work. Our own engineering teams have experimented with some changes that have proven effective, including:

    • A globally revised team structure that embraces a culture of autonomy and breaks larger engineering teams into smaller groups. Smaller groups help engineers feel more engaged, valued and empowered; it keeps meetings short and focused and allows for more parallel streams of work.
    • Overhauling our design process to get a champion or ‘anchor’ from the dev team involved in key features early on. This anchor is responsible for translating product and design requests into technical specs and is the de facto technical lead of the feature. Having this role rotate between team members for each feature means each member gets a chance to grow their skills as a technical lead.
    • Assigning dedicated designers to smaller groups to empower them to make small adjustments mid-flight. This would allow standups to operate as mini working sessions to iron out technical details that would normally be resolved through ‘shoulder taps’ or in-person quick questions.
    • Placing a strong emphasis on sprint retros as a way to make real changes to the way work gets done. When used in conjunction with an initiative to empower devs, sprint retros became a powerful tool to get dev feedback on improving the process.
    • Keeping teams accountable by encouraging transparency and clear communication as a tradeoff for their autonomy. We encouraged note-taking and regular updates, as well as clear goal-setting from the teams at the beginning of each sprint. By holding teams accountable to the goals that they set, it became easy to see when things were and were not working.
    • Experimenting with a four-day workweek to see if we can drive both greater happiness and productivity. This was perhaps the boldest of our experiments; we demonstrated trust in our team and set clear expectations around outcomes rather than hours. This has motivated our team and raised their morale in crucial ways at a time when switching jobs was both tempting and easy.

    Hacks That Worked in Person

    What are some of the things that worked in the office? This list will be different for each organization; for us, it was group brainstorms, in-person one-on-ones, summer Fridays and ongoing vibe checks. Here are some of the ways we hacked these to make them work for remote teams:

    • Group brainstorms: Digital whiteboards like Miro or Mural have been great. Digital sticky notes, too. This has enabled distributed engineering teams to contribute either all at once or asynchronously.
    • Summer Fridays: Give people the afternoon off even if it isn’t technically “leaving the office early.” Or try having everyone shut off notifications on Friday (or Monday morning) so they can get some undisturbed work done before shutting off for the weekend. Monthly mental health days off for the whole company can be a great idea too.
    • In-person one-on-ones: With Zoom, something is definitely lacking. Try spending half the one-on-one meeting chatting casually about things other than work.
    • Vibe check: Open office hours dedicated to work culture; surveys from time to time to gather quick informal feedback or think about other ways to elicit ongoing feedback from every employee, including engineering teams.

    Generate Culture and Well-Being

    What keeps most employees at companies is social bonding, inspiring projects and the possibility for growth. A question a lot of executives at previously onsite organizations are asking themselves is, “How do you fulfill the need for social bonding when most employees, including your engineering team, are remote?” In other words, how do you bond socially and do so remotely? Two goals we have identified are getting team members talking outside of work while avoiding Zoom fatigue issues and ongoing opportunities to share personal successes with colleagues.

    Some of the ways we have built culture are:

    • Having (non-mandatory) Friday lunch and games like trivia, Jeopardy!, games or online games
    • Different ongoing events like photography challenges, health challenges and even an at-home Iron Chef-style cookoffs.
    • Having leaders share how they spent their weekends and time off. We believe in demonstrating a healthy work-life balance from the top down and encouraging our team to take the time they need to unplug and recharge.
    • Figuring out how (and how not) to surface urgent issues via Slack; working on a system to avoid pinging people after hours for non-urgent issues.

    Above All, Manage With Empathy

    These last two years have been exhausting for most people. Hands down, the best way to manage and engage the people you work with—no matter if they are in engineering or marketing—is to be empathetic to the difficulties that they may be going through outside of work. Executive teams can make all the tactical changes to their teams they want, but without managers that really care about their teams, you will inevitably fail to keep the best people around. Empathy-driven leaders lift their team members up and drive the kind of culture people want to be part of.