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Author: Ravs Kaur

  • Best Practices to Improve your Engineering Sprints

    Best Practices to Improve your Engineering Sprints

    What is the purpose of sprints? We break work into sprints so we can more easily monitor, estimate and predict what we want to ship and when. Over the years, engineering teams have gotten used to moving quickly from one sprint to the next, but I think it’s important to be more thoughtful in how we plan and execute sprints.

    Running effective and successful sprints can define whether or not your organization is able to ship high-quality software fast and often. It also gives teams more flexibility and the ability to quickly change something that is not working or, on the other hand, to iterate on a successful technology. 

    After almost 20 years as an engineer, manager and as a CTO, I have found there are several best practices that improve the sprints that are part of my team’s software development life cycle. 

    Sprint Planning

    When planning a sprint, there are several things to keep in mind.

    Make Sure the Work Aligns with Business Priorities

    There are always a number of elements an engineering team can focus on during any given sprint. It’s fairly easy to lose sight of the business’ end goal. Make sure to gut-check to make sure that the sprint goals align with current business priorities.

    Ensure the Workload is Balanced From the Start

    This seems like an obvious statement, but make sure team members have equivalent workloads so you avoid burnout. It is also important to understand how different engineers on the team work—some people work best by selecting their own tasks with items that are unassigned, some pick up unfinished tasks as they finish others and some prefer to be assigned certain tasks because they have specialized skills. 

    Don’t Underestimate the Time That Interruptions/Additions Take 

    Along the same lines as the above, don’t overlook this for several reasons. Without adequate, data-driven insight into the actual state of each team member’s workload, it is almost impossible to gauge what’s happening in real-time. While business-critical sprints are assumed to take priority, side projects, Slack interruptions and meetings can easily consume an engineer’s day. Make sure to proactively check that each member has enough true deep work time without becoming burned out. 

    Don’t Underestimate the Time it Takes to get Things to a Done State

    Sometimes engineering teams only look at the development stage, but the full cycle required for the software to get to the end user might take longer. Allotting the right amount of time to get the job done across all phases of development will help avoid unexpected surprises. 

    When You Get to Mid-Sprint

    Monitor Unplanned Work

    Initial planning doesn’t necessarily take into account the bugs and fire drills that will likely arise after the sprint starts. Pay close attention to any mid-sprint additions and adjust as necessary. There may be team members who have cleared their sprint queue and are capable of taking on this work, but being aware of team members’ workloads at every stage is critical. 

    Do Daily Stand-Ups and Raise Flags as Early as Possible

    This will help anyone encountering roadblocks so a small issue doesn’t turn into a huge bottleneck. If you look closely at your PR cycle time, you will find a ton of insights about where roadblocks often happen. Using historical data during sprints can also go a long way toward helping identify potential bottlenecks, allowing you to proactively avoid friction by delegating reviews or setting out additional time for approvals. 

    Get Ahead of Burnout

    The tech industry has a turnover rate of 13.2%—pretty high when compared to other sectors. But the reality is that it can be really difficult to identify burnout without hard data. Don’t wait until people start speaking out about being overworked: Burnout prevention should be a full-time focus. Before sprints, make sure people aren’t coming in with high levels of fatigue and make sure that overtime doesn’t routinely increase throughout.

    Use Sprint Progress Estimations to Reprioritize

    Each sprint starts off with a set workload, but in reality, every sprint is dynamic. Take a look at each day’s progress and evaluate if your team is ahead of or behind schedule. If you are on track to finish a majority of the work, you can anticipate a successful sprint end. If not, don’t worry; you can always recommend that your team recalculate priorities. Engineering managers can take this time to load-balance some of the heavier work and shift goals to the next sprint as needed. Staying flexible while maintaining a clear view of what is actually happening during the sprint, will inevitably result in success. 

    At the End of the Sprint

    Do a Thorough Sprint Retrospective 

    As a team leader, you should constantly be thinking about how things are going and how people are feeling. If you can, use hard data to look at things like time allocation, PR throughput and any items added mid-sprint. Taking notes throughout the sprint will help remind you of any issues that came up, and you can discuss ways to improve for next time. Each sprint is a chance to learn; the more you learn, the better the sprint and the better the product will be for end users. 

  • How to Build Healthy Engineering Teams

    How to Build Healthy Engineering Teams

    A common challenge today for engineering teams is the increasing complexity of their jobs and figuring out how to make it both productive and enjoyable without burning out.

    Over the last 10 years, the role of a software engineer has evolved drastically. Software continues to reach unprecedented scale, it is becoming more complex and customer expectations are higher than ever. Organizations from all industries are now becoming software companies and, with the pandemic, everyone is feeling the effects of burnout.

    There are close to a million unfilled IT jobs in the United States. To ensure organizations are able to continue innovating, the industry needs the tools, state of mind and reliable practices to make this career sustainable.

    Creating an industry with healthy productivity is paramount. But too much of a focus on going faster without addressing burnout is a recipe for disaster. Engineering managers need to constantly balance both. Here are some things they should keep in mind:

    Invest in Engineering Productivity

    Companies are increasingly hiring for roles focused on engineering productivity—there are currently hundreds of open job postings from organizations looking for these skills. These jobs are aimed at making developers and engineers’ lives and work easier by focusing on streamlining how things are done within the engineering organization—including improving developer workflow processes, execution efficiency and product quality. They are often responsible for building internal tools that support cross-functional and developer workflows. Even with a relatively small engineering team, organizations can start thinking about bringing on a team member dedicated to making engineers’ roles within the company easier.

    Focusing on Healthy Productivity

    Productivity is, and will always be, extremely important, but potential burnout should also be seriously considered in the process. Remote work during the quarantine and the pandemic has brought this front and center. When people don’t have enough deep work time, they often work longer hours which can eventually lead to burnout. An average employee has 11 minutes to focus between distractions at work and then, after an interruption, it can take around 23 minutes to return to the original task. In addition, the average worker attends 15 meetings per week.

    There are many questions about how workers’ productivity has been impacted since early 2020, and research has found that developer productivity isn’t a problem—but burnout is. From March to December 2020 the study found:

    • Deep work time—a two-hour period of uninterrupted work—decreased by 22% between March and December 2020.
    • Average time in meetings went up by 67% from March to December 2020.
    • Pre-pandemic, 10% of developers were showing “always-on” behaviors at work, but that percentage went up to 15% and then to 20% by the end of the year.

    Focusing on driving healthy productivity—where developers are productive but not overworked—is key to keeping your employees.

    Strengthening Engineering Managers

    Managers play a key role in keeping engineering burnout in check. Ensuring that managers ‘manage well’ is not a new idea, but today there are particular complexities that make the engineering manager role both uniquely challenging and especially important.

    It is now widely acknowledged that culture is a considerable part of what gets employees to stick around. But culture isn’t only employee benefits like trendy offices, great snacks and other relatively superficial—though still important—benefits. What really matters is identifying and building teams that really care about one another on a personal level and making sure that incoming employees feel the same.

    With engineering teams, there is a tendency to focus primarily on the technology being created rather than the people who are creating it. While this approach can absolutely result in successful products, it is often the default management style for managers who don’t have the tools to do otherwise. Moving from software engineer to manager requires a whole new skill set that involves different communication styles, time management, organization, tools and software, scoping work, learning how to effectively delegate and identifying the right people to complete the team.

    As challenges continue to evolve, organizations need to ensure that engineering managers are able to support each individual on their team. It is so important to make sure that people feel aligned with a mission they care about and that their career interests and goals are being met. Not all of those can be measured with data, so managers have an all-important role in keeping up with the pulse of the team.

    Building Helpful Tools and Growing Developer Communities

    In the last decade, the speed of innovation in enterprise technology has skyrocketed and the amount of code and tools developers need to master has increased. At the same time, the number of unfilled job openings continues to grow. There are a lot of great trends that are helping to close this gap including low-code and no-code tools as well as a massive increase in community resources.

    No-code/low-code tools: As both technical and non-technical organizations hire an increasing number of developers, low-code and no-code have become more prevalent. With frameworks that allow even those without a technical background to deploy software, no-code tools open development capabilities to an increasingly diverse subset of people. While these tools will not replace developers, they will make it possible for more people to enter the field of software development and help companies continue to innovate.

    Developer community: The amount of resources available to new and existing developers has also skyrocketed in the last several years from open source communities to Stack Overflow to the ability to simply Google how to do something in code. The Linux Foundation’s extensive training catalog is one example; even Medium has a wealth of basic technical info, how-tos and deep dives available. If you’re looking to adopt a new tool, one of your main priorities should be to look at the size of the community so that you can easily troubleshoot problems if they arise. Having access to resources from community members that have gone through the exact same problems you encounter is priceless.

    The above are all just a start. Teams can go even further by finding and adopting analytics tools to dive deeper into specific productivity metrics. These can give managers and executive teams the hard data they need to make educated decisions that will help them keep their teams and drive innovation. It is worth investing the time and the tools to maintain your engineering resources. By doing these things, organizations can reach and maintain healthy productivity.

  • How to Build a People-First Engineering Team

    How to Build a People-First Engineering Team

    When we think about successful technology teams, there is a tendency to primarily focus on the technology being created rather than the people who are creating it. While both approaches can lead to successful products, a technology-first approach is often the default when software engineers become managers without necessarily having the right tools to manage effectively. Becoming an engineering manager requires an entirely new skill set that involves different communication styles, time management, organization, tools and software, scoping work, learning how to effectively delegate and identifying the right people to complete the team.

    As a CTO, and having gone through this transition, I have noticed that the more a manager is able to be in sync with the people on their team, the less burnout they experience, the higher the employee retention rates and the better work their employees will do.

    While most people won’t be entirely people- or technology-focused, here is a quick overview of the differences:

    • A team-oriented manager knows the personal and professional struggles their people are experiencing, and there’s a sense that the team they run is all working together on a mission toward the same goal. When you talk to this type of manager, they will naturally gravitate towards giving status updates on the wellbeing of individuals.
    • Managers who tend to see the team through a more technical lens will instead identify parts of the project or technological or strategic roadblocks that are impacting the team.

    The same issues will be dealt with very differently by these different types of managers. It can be beneficial to record yourself when you are talking about your team to identify where your focus is, and evaluate if that feels right for you.

    Building Effective 1:1 Communication with Team Members

    An individual contributor is normally accustomed to arriving at weekly 1:1s and working with their manager to solve any problems they may have. When they become a manager, it becomes their role to coach team members to solve their own problems, in addition to building trust. This role change takes preparation, and, if you are unsure how to do it well, you may find it helpful to draft out an agenda that you can follow if needed. You can also gain knowledge about this process by talking to more experienced managers.

    What do you talk about in your 1:1 meetings? Even if you are more a technology-oriented person, 1:1 meetings with your team should be less about the status of projects and more about how the person you are speaking to is doing and how you, as a manager, can help. Having started as a software engineer myself, and now as a CTO, I have found the below questions to be helpful as I navigate how best to help my team thrive in their roles.

    1. “How are you doing?” If you are speaking with a team manager, another great question is, “How is your team doing?” You want to genuinely understand the status of the individual outside of the technical aspects of the job.
    2. “Do you have any feedback for me?”
      I always ask for feedback. For a while, they may not have any; but I often find they start with a small one like “Better options for snacks.” This is an excellent opportunity to build trust by improving the work experience. The next time, they will probably share more until you receive really important feedback, while also improving the relationship. The important thing to remember, here, is to respond to the feedback.
    3. “On a scale of zero to 10, how much fun are you having at work?”
      I really want people to have fun at work. You can ask them to give you a number between zero and ten. When they respond with a number, say, six, a great follow-up question can be to ask what is needed to change the situation so that number becomes a seven. How can you help get them there? I have heard a wide spectrum of answers to this question, ranging from easy to complex; from things like permission to be unresponsive for an hour a day to the desire to learn the skills needed to do a different type of job.
    4. “Where do you see yourself in the next two years and 10 years?”
      Helping your team define both long and short term goals is a really important part of being a manager. Specifically for engineers, it is a great idea to think about if you want to continue moving up in an engineering role, or if making the switch to a managerial role is a better fit.
    5. “How can I help you get to the next level in your career?”
      It is common to get sidetracked when balancing your day-to-day work with your personal life. You can also use 1:1 meetings to help your team members identify what they can do to hit their short- and long-term goals, and how to maintain a better work-life balance.

    Supporting Colleagues

    This last year has been tough for most people, to varying degrees, which has solidified the idea that we need to be there for team members during difficult times; this goes beyond the pandemic. That can mean sending their favorite meal via delivery, sending a care package or simply making it very clear that when someone on your team needs to step out or take time off, that is fine – no questions asked. To be able to be offline and not need to do a long handoff is so important when you are going through a hard time.

    During this move to remote work, as in many leadership teams, my company has gone against the cultural norm of keeping life and work separate. We have acknowledged that it is too difficult to do that right now, and very publicly recognized that everyone is going through something. It has felt like mental bandwidth is filled up with things going on outside of work, so as team members, it is good to make sure work doesn’t add to that pressure.

    In a way, this pandemic period has broken down barriers between work and “life” that has made it almost obligatory to focus on people first. From my perspective, this has been a breakthrough in how we can do business moving forward. By thinking about each individual on your team, everyone can be uplifted and heard, which can be the impetus to more innovation. If you are operating at your max with no slack in your system and little support from managers and teammates, you lose creativity. As innovative teams, this experience has been a reminder to build people-first principles into our cultures to promote a healthy work-life balance that lends itself to innovative solutions and better results.

  • Managing Remotely: 6 Ways to Support Engineers

    Managing Remotely: 6 Ways to Support Engineers

    Managing remote engineers effectively comes with a host of considerations. Here are six to keep in mind

    Dear 2020, we’d like our deep work back.

    Our shift to remote work in 2020 moved the majority of face-to-face interactions into screens. Although initially we assumed this shift was a temporary adjustment, most of us now realize it’s just the opposite. Twitter, Facebook, Shopify, Slack, Box and more have publicly declared remote work is here to stay and they are not alone—84% of businesses now report they will increase remote work post-COVID-19 pandemic.

    With our new reality came next-level distractions—homeschoolers, playful pets, social unrest and, oh yes, a scary global pandemic. Moreover, the lockdowns rewired our collaboration habits, stretched our bandwidth, and threatened our ability to focus on our best work.

    As a result, managers—the forgotten middle of the workforce—are emerging as quiet heroes fighting to protect team effectiveness. At Uplevel, we’ve worked with engineers nationwide and have learned the top ways that managers can help their engineers empower their best work:

    Mind the Meetings

    Engineers want their managers to protect their time for deep work. They are constantly bombarded with changing priorities that require endless meetings, crushing their ability to dive in, solve problems and innovate. How bad is it? Of the 250 engineers and managers we interviewed, 50% of individual contributors reported that more than twice a week they don’t have enough time to do their work, with 19% of engineers reporting it’s an issue every day. Bottom line: If a meeting “coulda been an email,” make it so.

    Say No to Micromanagement

    Nobody likes the helicopter parents of work. The constant hover erodes trust, destroys morale and slows down otherwise efficient, effective people. Top performers will tell you, autonomy contributes to their overall happiness at work, and research continually tells us that happy employees are more productive and they stick around longer. Instead of spinning on the minutia, make it your mission to block distractions and tackle bottlenecks for them so they are empowered and available to do their best work. More than one-third—39%—of engineers are blocked on issues they can’t unblock themselves at least once a week. That’s a weekly chance to free your team to do their best work.

    Embrace Flexibility

    For the sake of protecting “the flow,” it’s a good time to go with the flow, too. Overly structured, old-school project management must give way to the fluid, flexible tools empowering us to get work done anytime, anywhere. Embrace a project management style that is as fluid as your team’s changing priorities and consider light-touch micro check-ins that leave room to revisit the game plan weekly.

    More Comms, Not Less

    Right now, it’s easy for individual contributors to feel both socially and professionally isolated. As a result, their confidence waivers and paranoid flares as they question whether their contributions make an impact or get noticed at all. Now is not the time to back off of communications. Don’t confuse this with “respecting personal boundaries.” If you’re worried that communicating will somehow exert unintended pressure, simply establish clear expectations and model them by example. A simple way to lean into communications is to make them more frequent, much shorter and less formal. By acting more like a coach than a manager, you’ll not only keep the team focused on the right tasks but you’ll also show them you care about their well-being beyond “the work.”

    Lead By Example

    The quickest way to zap trust and kill morale is by ignoring your own rules. Engineers want their managers to lead by example and consistently exhibit the same behaviors they expect from their teams. If it’s respecting work/life balance (and refraining from midnight emails), don’t hit the send button until it’s time. If it’s a commitment to stay present during group meetings, stop multitasking. If it’s a promise to wear pants on Zoom calls, put your pants on. You get the point: Don’t create rules for remote teams that you’re unwilling to follow yourself.

    Create Opportunities To Connect

    You’ve heard it time and again since March: We’re in this together. It’s true. No one rolled into the pandemic with a playbook; managers and their teams are winging it. Forced isolation is not a normal human state and it shows. Across the country, doctors report more cases of depression, domestic violence and substance abuse. In fact, a poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation shows the pandemic is taking its toll—45% of adults say this pandemic has affected their mental health. Another study by mental health provider Ginger found 69% of employees admit this pandemic has been the most stressful time of their career. How can you help? Use this collective behavioral beta test as an opportunity to show empathy and connect. Are team happy hours gone? Replace them with the dogs and cats of Zoom at the beginning of your weekly meeting. Are team lunches no longer doable? Have virtual outdoor picnics and encourage your team to get some fresh air. Be creative—it’s a great time to rally around the things that connect us as humans, not just teammates.

    Thanks to the COVID pandemic, 64% of us now commute from our beds to our home office (or the kitchen table, or sofa). That’s a ninefold increase in four months. As it turns out, many of us don’t mind the change. A full 60% of us would actually prefer to keep it this way. If our engineering teams stay virtual, it’s our job to empower them so that remote work can still bring about their best work. As we embrace this ever-changing world, now is the time to tap into our empathy and communication and leverage the data and technology available to us to ensure we turn hardship into innovation.