4 Effective Ways to we Manage our Software Engineering Team
Managing an engineering team is a difficult endeavor. To accomplish the job well, you utilize technical expertise, build leadership abilities, design a structure that allows our team to perform at its best, and grow with each sprint. Though it may appear to be a lot to handle, we are most likely well on our approach to assembling a high-performing software engineering team.
1. Bringing in the proper people to the team
The first step is we made sure our team is built with the right members. Part of that comes from refining the technical interview process, and part comes from thoroughly understanding each team member's skills, flaws, and personal motivations. It's also critical to understand the entire product roadmap and how the company grows.
2. Finding and removing bottlenecks
To properly manage and create significant progress, we first took a step back and understood what limits our team. This is where bottlenecks come into play. Bottlenecks (also known as limitations) are things that impede our team's progress. The simplest place to start is with the delivery lead time, which is the whole time from ticket generation to in-production. We also specifically quantified the cycle time between each stage in our workflows, then systematically addressed the longest cycle durations.
3. Increased our undisturbed development time
We began with meetings. According to a recent industry poll of developers, over 35% identify meetings as their largest productivity obstacle. Long all-hands meetings and brief stand-ups may also stifle productivity, especially if they happen throughout the day. To avoid this, managers undertook calendar checks to determine typical "off periods" and arranged them accordingly. We also urged developers to schedule times during the day when they feel most "in the zone"—this way, no meeting will divert their focus and prevent them from doing serious work.
4. Increased customer attention throughout the technical team
Putting a technical staff in front of consumers may appear counter-intuitive to some. However, we offered engineers firsthand experience dealing with clients which had genuine benefits. There are a few straightforward measures taken to consistently drive client focus among engineers. The first is rotating employees through the support desk ticket and ticket resolution processes and providing them with even more insight into client concerns and typical bottlenecks. Engineers actively engaged in the product discovery stages. This bridged the gap between what customers desire to see in a product and what is technically feasible from a development standpoint.
In addition to formal methods for monitoring employee happiness and productivity, a manager must cultivate a feedback-friendly workplace. We made eNPS results public and have team discussions to better understand what works and what doesn't, as well as allowed individual contributors to express their opinions on how the environment can be improved to facilitate better outcomes.