It shouldn’t be a surprise that the outlook for many tech companies in 2023 is not rosy. With layoffs across the industry, we’re all going through a challenging time - whether you’re a dev or not.

The last 14 years have been an unprecedented boom time - but economic conditions will eventually challenge all companies. How do we, as leaders, handle these challenges? 
I sat down with Michael Stahkne, VP of platform at Circle CI; Lewis Tuff, VP of engineering at Blockchain.com; Carolyn Vo, partner & head of engineering at Oliver Wyman, for a panel at Dev Interrupted's conference to answer that exact question. Here’s how these leaders described what effective leadership looks like in uncertain times.

1. Increase the quality and frequency of communication

Some people will see this as counterintuitive. If times are tough, don’t you need more time to get work done? However, stellar communication is one critical way to lead effectively in both prosperous  times and times of crisis.

Michael had a strong viewpoint on this: in an async remote world, he will communicate when he needs to, and he expects his colleagues to share when they need time back. They have tools with settings to mute communications and get notifications as they see fit, and they can choose when to respond. 

Why meeting communication matters

It’s important to acknowledge that part of communicating well involves meetings (gasp!). It’s common to hear engineers complain about meetings. Yes, it’s good to streamline meeting schedules to reduce synchronous status updates that force context-switching. There are, however, ways to have effective meetings—and some are essential. Many meetings are crucial working sessions where you can collaborate with your colleagues.

Yet not all communication is formal. Informal signaling is also key. For example,  Carolyn shared  how she jokingly refers to herself as “Jr. Probationary Intern” to break down the artificial separation between you and your teammates as you become more senior. You can’t get rid of the power dynamic completely, but you don’t want your new people to be scared of you, and you need to have their trust to understand people’s motivations. Carolyn chooses to try to lower that separation through humor and direct acknowledgment.

You can't let this happen:

2. Connect motivation to business results

Understanding your team’s motivation is also essential. When things are uncertain, you must determine what motivates each team member. They’ll have questions like “Will I get to write the code I like?” And you have to answer immediately, “Yes, you will,” or “Yes, but you’re going to be reallocated to this new group.”

Michael also noted an often underrated motivating factor: How is your company oriented?

If your company is customer-oriented, if you’re focused on what they’re trying to achieve and are helping them do that—it softens the blows that land on your own company in tough times. Cutting back on your bets and focusing on your high-impact projects can also help with this and is sometimes necessary; sadly, this is often seen in layoffs or “reductions in workforce”.

Instill excitement through experimentation

Once you understand people’s motivations, you can help bring joy by providing space for teams to have fun.

When valuations are going up and to the right, it’s a lot easier to have work feel fun - so in an uncertain period, it’s imperative to get teams excited when you can. It lets people stop focusing on the downturn and instead on things that excite them.

Everyone can define “fun” differently, but knowing your team’s motivation can help you find the right ways to provide some levity and keep everyone aligned. You can bring fun in simple ways, like sharing something interesting you learned at the start of a meeting or, in Michael’s case, by throwing in emojis on Slack and shooting memes at a high rate per day.

For Lewis, teammates can find fun by having space to experiment and try new things with little pressure. Even if you disagree with your direct report’s decisions, part of providing space to experiment is still advocating for them and letting their choices play out—even if what they’re making feels like something you’ve seen before. Even then, the variables can be different, and it could turn out entirely differently. Whatever you do, don’t tell everyone you disagree with your team member’s idea. 

3. Have the tough conversations

One way to understand how much fun a team can have is to understand your tolerance for failure, which can get stricter as things get uncertain. But being transparent about this tolerance will continue to give team members the space to enjoy their work.

There is a myth that you must filter lousy news and hard decisions as a leader. But being transparent helps people understand the context behind why things are happening and helps ensure people aren’t being shocked. If you end up filtering news, you breed rumors and speculations, which can produce resentment.

Blame is a communication killer

Another pitfall to avoid with tough communication is blame. One example of blameful leadership is when a team member asks for a raise, and the leader says, “I want to give you one, but my boss won’t let me.” This type of blaming irks leaders like Michael, partly because it comes off as inauthentic. Authenticity is an integral part of being transparent and conducting successful challenging communication. There are a lot of discussions you can have during tough conversations beyond finding someone else to blame. Plus, people who own messaging are more likely to get promoted.

What to avoid when providing critical feedback

Providing harsh feedback can be challenging, particularly across cultural boundaries where how tough feedback is communicated can vary wildly. Like Carolyn, this is an area of improvement I see for myself as a leader, and somewhere, I’ve made mistakes. One example: I had to communicate critical feedback to a team member and thought I was writing a thorough and fair review by simply writing extensive feedback and including positives and negatives.

However, I didn’t spend enough time thinking about how to communicate that critical feedback: I started by addressing an area of concern and initially shared the feedback in writing vs. having a conversation with them. In some cultures, such as the Netherlands, this might have been perfectly acceptable--but in working with a US-based team member who was seeing layoffs at other companies, it backfired. Instead of helping provide feedback to initiate improvement, I’d caused them to worry that their job was at risk. 

In the end, I had to assuage this team member's worries--and acknowledge my own failure in how I communicated the criticism; I lacked context and empathy in my communication. When sharing critical feedback, I needed to remember the old US business adage of two positives to one negative.

4. Remove team roadblocks but track team progress

While communication is crucial for leadership, particularly in tough times, it isn’t the only thing. It’s also important to buckle down and ask yourself, “How can we as leaders remove roadblocks?”

If we want our team members to direct how they want to progress, we need to figure out how to support that and track it. By tracking this for your reports, you can align how you feel they progressed with how they feel while tailoring things to the individual. For engineering leaders, understanding the health of your team - without being a data-driven tyrant - is a crucial first step. 

A helpful next step is to find the individuals who are driving the company's principles and have them mentor teammates. Leadership can come from every seat but often requires effort to foster culturally and enable team members' progression.

Leading teams in uncertain times

Leading in uncertain times hinges on communication, transparency, and understanding motivation. You can’t treat everyone the same, as everyone has different goals and ideas for fun. The more you tailor to your individuals, the more you can help your team thrive in uncertainty. 

Watch my whole conversation with Carolyn, Michael, and Lewis on our YouTube 👇

“Treating devs like human beings” may sound like it should be an obvious idea. Yet we see the opposite happening on a regular basis - developers measured on lines of code, managers who expect engineers to act like automatons, and too many practices that sacrifice developer happiness and decay teams for short-term delivery.

To discuss how to fix these negative practices that too often damage our industry, I was joined by 3 experts in making the transition from churn and burn software development to more successful, human-centric development. 

Here are the 6 major takeaways from my conversation with Kelly Vaughn, Director of Engineering at Spot AI; engineering leadership coach Lena Reinhard and VP of Engineering at Range, Jean Hsu.

1. Humanize Interviews

Sometimes, we must remind each other that developers are knowledge workers, not robots. During our conversation, Kelly shared her view on one of the roots of this problem: the belief that engineers shouldn’t be required to code as part of the interview process. 

Her reason? Such tests don’t reflect actual working conditions. After all, when was the last time anyone stood over your shoulder at work and watched you code? Instead, she advocates for more problem-oriented system-design interviews that showcase how candidates think. 

Jean aligned with this, saying interviews should focus more on what it’s like to work with a person instead of how technically strong they are. However, humanizing interviews starts before the interview itself -  it means thinking about what your job descriptions and interviews cater to: Do they support people who have kids? People who already have a second job? Or do they hone in on “super passionate” developers who often have more free time?

2. API for Humans

Beyond interviews, Jean thinks that treating your working developers as humans is one of the industry’s biggest gaps. People moving into leadership and management roles are not trained to communicate and figure out, “Hey, what’s important to this other human?” She recalls one communication workshop where a person shared the takeaway “I feel like I just learned an API for humans.” 

Kelly Vaughn brings a unique perspective to this discussion - that of a  trained therapist. She leverages this training to monitor behavior and patterns of speech to see when interventions are needed and to understand the needs of her developers. It’s interesting to compare this approach to other managers who don’t get the same in-depth training in communication and in improving their emotional intelligence. So many times we promote developers to managers and actually set them up for failure. As a leader, it’s crucial to view developers not just as resources but as complex humans so that you can help them understand what they really want and how to create mutual value as part of the team. If we solely focus on the value to the business - and not the developer experience in building that business value - we sacrifice for short-term productivity bursts and decrease retention rates, causing major issues and costing the business money in the longterm.

One of my favorite examples of how to approach this dichotomy comes from Jean - one of her engineers told her they were having challenges balancing full-time work with other goals. This engineer was talented and a valuable member of the team, so Jean worked with them to transition them into a part-time role that let them have more time back for personal projects and more closely fit what they were looking for. This kind of relationship is challenging to develop, but when done right can both deliver for the business's needs and recognize each human's unique challenges. 

3. Can a Dev Manager Be Non-Technical?

With this focus on communication and humanization vs. technical skills, the natural next question is whether or not developers need to be led by managers with technical skills. From Lena’s experience, many great engineering managers are people who haven’t been developers and likely never will. It doesn’t take someone from a technical background to enjoy working in tech and understand the motivations of their developers. Yet we continue to see companies where leaders seem to think that the way to fill gaps is pattern matching their engineers. They’re making people leaders who have similar skills or behaviors to their subordinates or who excelled as an individual contributor without necessarily having leadership skills. This contributes to engineers who struggle or burn out in poorly-fitting roles.

Part of the joy of engineering leadership is seeing your engineers grow. Part of letting them grow is to stop fixing for them and start coaching them to do the solving themselves. And when you come from a non-technical background, that temptation is less, which is part of why many great managers are not from a technical background.

4. Bringing Your Full Self to Work

Our panelists views one-on-ones not as a place to give performance advice, but as a place for engineers to share their dreams, personal endeavors, and concerns. Kelly, Lena and Jean all felt that one-on-ones were a powerful tool for leaders to break through the dehumanizing barriers of software development as production line. In fact, because of Kelly’s background as a trained therapist, she views a successfull one-on-one as something close to the therapy, though she cautions this approach doesn’t fit everyone.

However, just like a therapy session, a good one-on-one should be individualized, confidential, difficult to cancel and devoid of surprises. A leader also needs to bring their whole self to the meeting, or the employee won’t bring their whole self. 

Lena resonated deeply with this. It can be tricky for people to bring their whole selves due to culture, and a leader should figure out what their employees’ boundaries are between personal and work life. It’s also important to recognizes that it’s not just regional or company culture, but also generational culture that affects those boundaries. At Range, Jean’s team report their mood for the day as well as what they’re working on during check-ins. She shared a story where she was explaining this process to another older engineering leader and that that  person laughed in surprise that people would want to share something like mood in the workplace. 

Jean feels strongly that the way a company talks is really representative of how they view their employees. For example, consider when companies call it “resource allocation” instead of “how employees spend their time.” In a higher-level position, you need to watch the way you talk and how you’re feeling about the people who work for you.

5. Metrics

Kelly had a great example of humanizing vs. dehumanizing metrics: time to close a ticket vs. the impact of closing a ticket. The latter is much more powerful and speaks more to the nuance of what’s going on with a team. Metrics shouldn’t just track information, but also give people something to look forward to. People want to be doing their best work and as I’ve written, we can use metrics to improve productivity without sacrificing developer experience

You can get a feel for how humanizing - or dehumanizing - a company is by what metrics they use when measuring their devs. For example, lines of code is a dehumanizing metric because it’s meaningless to the actual value a developer can bring. One key to humanizing metrics is making sure the metric is something that a developer is aware of and has direct influence over. Kelly had a great example of humanizing vs. dehumanizing metrics: time to close a ticket vs. the impact of closing a ticket. The latter is much more powerful and speaks more to the nuance of what’s going on with a team. 

As we talk about ad naseum at LinearB, metrics should focus more on team performance than individual performance. Metrics shouldn’t just track information, but also give people something to look forward to. People want to be doing their best work and as I’ve written, we can use metrics to improve productivity without sacrificing developer experience

6. Burnout

Another crucial challenge that stops people from doing their best work is burnout. Jean shared about a time when her company shut down for a short break and people were hoping everyone would come back from the break refreshed. But the break was amid the COVID-19 pandemic, and instead of returning refreshed, she came back tired. During a morning check-in, she shared how tired she still felt and how the short break didn’t make up for months of pandemic stress. One of her direct reports told her later how relieved they were that Jean shared, because they felt the same way! Acknowledging the elephants in the room is crucial as a leader; everything can’t always be rosy and your team wants to feel seen in the challenges you share.

Another important thing to understand about burnout is that it’s not just something you need to accept: Kelly pointed out that burnout is recognized as a mental health syndrome. Knowing that, leaders must be aware that cultural influences impact people’s willingness to talk about mental health, including regional and national cultural considerations. Your team members may not want to talk about it, so you have to look for signs before the burnout hits full force. Address these signs as soon as you can, and give the employee the time and the space they need to heal from it. 

You’ve also got to manage upwards around burnout: When the pandemic hit, many companies said, “We care about you,” but didn’t take action. Instead of reducing capacity to 80% and telling people they could be less productive during that time, they tightened goals. They worried more about their performance than their employees’ humanity. As a leader within your organization, you need to raise your voice in leadership discussions and challenge the organization's negative actions by showing that there is a better way to lead.

Humanizing Means Performance

Humanizing developers is critical and isn’t divorced from performance. As Jean says, it’s not like you can say, “Let’s just get the team running; then we can focus on caring about them.” Caring about your team allows them to perform with great results! 

Watch my whole conversation with Jean, Kelly, and Lena on our YouTube 👇

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This article is based on an interview with Kubernetes co-founder Brendan Burns who appeared on the Dev Interrupted podcast.

The success of Kubernetes was never preordained - it took years of work.

While today it has grown to be one of the largest and most popular open source projects and become the go-to API for building cloud-native applications worldwide - it almost wasn’t even open source. 

Since its start in 2014, Kubernetes (an open-source orchestrator for deploying containerized applications) has transformed from a tiny project co-founded by three people, Joe Beda, Craig McLuckie, and Brendan Burns, into a production-grade infrastructure that powers large-scale production applications in various fields, from machine learning to online services. 

Created with the intent to simplify the task of building, deploying, and maintaining distributed systems, it allows people the world over to achieve new levels of velocity, agility, and reliability. Over the years, Kubernetes has grown into a large, successful open-source community - but it was a long journey getting there.

What is a container?

Before jumping into the history of Kubernetes, let’s first define a “container” because it often has a broad set of meanings. 

Fundamentally, a container is the process of taking an application and packaging it, building a binary representation of the pieces that make up that application like the software, configuration files, etc., and having a protocol for distributing it around the world. 

There are three pillars of what became known as containers: 

• Packaging everything so it's exactly the same, for instance, on a laptop as it is out in the cloud
• The distribution of step 1 needs to occur easily and around the world
• Creating an environment where a bug in one component of the process doesn’t affect another component

How it started

When we interviewed Kubernetes co-founder Brendan Burns on the Dev Interrupted podcast, he told us that as an engineer, he found himself gravitating towards spaces with opportunity. While working at Google, he noticed that Cloud had a lot of white space and thought it would be an attractive space to work in. At the time, he led a small team of about seven engineers and decided to transition his team over to Cloud. 

At the same time, his eventual Kubernetes co-founders Joe and Craig created Compute Engine, the virtual machine product for Google Cloud, and the three of them began to work together in Google’s Cloud division. While Joe and Craig focused on compute, Brendan worked in config management on things like CloudFormation and Terraform. 

Ideas were starting to coalesce, and the three of them were witnessing the challenges people faced trying to adopt Cloud - a far too difficult process. There were also some internal systems at Google, in particular a system called Borg, a cluster manager that’s still used today, that served as the initial inspiration for the three developers as they dreamt up Kubernetes. 

However, none of it would have been a reality without Docker.

Docker changes everything

As a prerequisite to the functionality of Kubernetes, people needed to be motivated to build container images and run containers. Docker was the startup that came along and convinced people why they should care about containment. All of a sudden, a use case existed, and an amazing opportunity presented itself. 

Docker didn’t have a lot of experience at scale, and they were focused on one machine, with a container and daemon on that machine - what they were lacking was orchestration. If a system was built that could act as a container-orchestrator, it represented not only a massive opportunity to change the market but to change the entire cloud landscape. 

When you think about what it takes to deploy an application up to the cloud or even to an on-premise collection of machines, it’s a lengthy process. It requires you to package up an application, distribute it, keep it running, have load-balanced traffic between the various pieces of the application, and an API to tie it all together. 

Prior to Kubernetes, some of these systems were in place, but nothing like today. Kubernetes is responsible for mainstreaming the idea of a distributed systems application environment for building and constructing distributed systems that span machines far and wide.

With the need for orchestration realized, the next step was selling the idea to executives.

Selling open source

Convincing people that it was possible and a good idea was pretty straightforward. There were folks at Google who understood what Joe, Craig, and Brendan were trying to do. The real battle was fighting to make Kubernetes open source. As Brendan shared in our interview, they had a lot of internal arguments at Google about it being open source. 

Mostly it came down to money and control. From a business perspective, if a product or system is massively successful and you’re the only one who can sell it, then you’re in a great position. Conversely, Brendan told us that he always felt that Kubernetes would only be massively successful if it had an ecosystem, and the best way to foster an ecosystem was to make it open source. 

This viewpoint is centered around the community that comes together to build the software. An amazing community formed early on of people who helped build docs, who helped build tutorials, who would talk about their work at conferences, and then an ecosystem of companies that were betting their whole business on the success of Kubernetes. Startups began popping up, saying things like, “Well the prerequisite for using my monitoring software is that you have a Kubernetes cluster.” All of the attention and goodwill formed a sort of virtuous cycle around Kubernetes.

Success has a way of looking easy

Soon enough, Kelsey Hightower, principal engineer for Google Cloud and Brendan’s co-author of the book Kubernetes: Up and Running: Dive into the Future of Infrastructure, came along and started doing a ton of evangelism and driving attention towards Kubernetes

It can be easy to look back and assume that it was easy, because Kubernetes just took over. It's present in every major public cloud at this point, people expect it to be in new systems. But the truth is that in those early years, it took a lot of hard work to build and evangelize Kubernetes. 

Brendan shared with us that his hope for the future is that the bits of Kubernetes sort of fade into the background. It’ll be there, and it’ll be important, but it won’t be talked about or thought about from day to day because, as he puts it, “There’s so much more that needs to be built.”

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As an engineer, you might have learned the basics from textbooks or watching a series of tutorials. 

Managing engineers is different and isn’t something that can be mastered from simply reading a book. 

In my experience, the only proven way to learn is by plugging into the collective wisdom of smart people who have done the hard work of actually managing engineering teams.

That’s why I was so happy to speak with Ian Nowland of Datadog.

With 20 years of engineering industry experience — 10 of which have been in management positions — Ian developed a unique approach toward engineering management, encapsulated in seven categories. 

These seven categories of engineering management are based on his own software-engineering experience, which includes 10 years at Amazon and are designed to help managers successfully direct, satisfy and retain employees, as well as maintain a healthy company culture. 

Some of the central components of Ian’s framework include taking the ego out of mistakes, developing a learning mindset towards management, and building social capital between teams.

We’ll dig into this more below. 

Using the 7 Categories of Engineering Management 

People often refer to the three P’s when it comes to management: 1) People; 2) Process; and 3) Product. 

But Ian believes that’s limiting when you’re thinking about management in engineering and doesn’t account for the full range of engineering activity.

Instead, Ian believes it’s more helpful to consider the following: 

1. People: Are people happy and growing in what is being built? 
2. Engineering: How are things being built? This is about focusing on how your engineers get stuff done and how well those processes work — like the efficacy of a team’s code-review process. 
3. Product: Are customers satisfied by what’s being built? Ian also refers to this category as “portfolio management.” It’s about communicating with an engineering team about their roadmap, what milestones they plan to explore in that year or quarter, and what story they want to tell through their work. 
4. Partners: Do your partners understand and agree with all of the above? It’s important to foster healthy relationships between teams and any affiliated groups across the company. 
5. Execution: How are things getting built? Managers have to think about what has to be done and how they should organize teams to meet annual milestones. 
6. Operations: Once your product/org is built, is it going to keep running? Operational processes, like scrums or sprints, are crucial to the success of a software engineering project, so it’s important that managers ensure these processes are effective and efficient. 
7. Company: Does the company align with all these answers? It’s every engineering manager’s responsibility to reflect their company’s culture. A manager’s actions (or inactions) will set a precedent for their teams and direct reports. 

The “Miss” Approach For Managing Engineers 

Ian believes that when you’re managing engineers, there’s a lot to oversee. There are tons of opportunities for mistakes along the way — they can and will happen. But Ian’s found that it’s through making mistakes — or “misses” — that everyone gets to improve. 

A “miss” occurs whenever something goes wrong that could’ve been prevented. But here’s the key: Don’t think of a miss as a mistake — it’s a teaching moment. 

It’s a subtle mindset shift. Instead of focusing on the mistake (which can be damaging to a person’s ego), view it as an opportunity for growth.

When you start thinking in terms of misses, it becomes easier to digest. It’s like: That’s okay, I’ll get it next time. Ian found this especially effective for people with perfectionist tendencies (and I’m the first to admit I definitely fall into that category). 

Using a Miss To Build Social Capital (aka Get What You Want)

Ian provided a beautiful example to illustrate what he was talking about.

Let’s get specific. Looking at the categories, here’s a miss I experienced in a previous job when dealing with partners at the company. 

At the time, I was managing a software team that was in charge of a network device. A previous manager had made the decision to use a different vendor, and the network team basically said: we’re out. As you can probably tell, there was some friction between the two teams. By the time I started working with this group of software engineers, it was clear they were in over their heads. 

I went to the woman who was the head of the network device team to ask if we could turn this over to her team — after all, software engineers have no business running networking devices. Since we were using our own vendor and her team was busy, she didn’t agree. 

At an earlier point in my career, I would have felt frustrated and left it at that. But past misses (and the seven categories!) have taught me to look at the bigger picture. In this case, she’s well-intentioned and doing the best she can. 

Considering the importance of building good relationships between teams, I focused on that. At one point, I even volunteered one of my engineers to help her with a software project to build goodwill. 

About a year later, I approached her again to ask about taking over this particular network device. This time the answer was yes. 

What changed? We’d built up some trust. We’d taken opportunities to show her that we were trying to do the right thing for the company (by helping her out), and so we’d established the social capital to get a positive response when we made an ask. 

Want to hear what Ian learned from other misses? Listen in at 11:50 to hear about a miss in execution and how he came back from a project that went off the rails. 

Does It Work? Measuring Success 

When it comes to measuring impact, Ian doesn’t believe there’s a universal measure of success — it’ll change according to the situation. 

Engineering leader Michael Lopp has written about management in terms of “organics and mechanics.” Ian tends to sway toward being an “organic,” which is essentially intuition-driven. 

In his current role, Ian oversees a lot of managers. One of the main things he looks at is whether the managers are surfacing misses early — before they feel like a surprise. 

When you manage a lot of different people, your job is to delegate well. The number of surprises is a good indicator of whether everyone is on top of what they’re responsible for — if there are few surprises, you don’t need to get too involved and that things are going well. 

When measuring operations and delivery goals, these are areas where it makes sense to apply different standards. For example, objectives and key results (OKRs) are helpful the higher up you go on the organizational chart. When evaluating managers, Ian wants to know: Did they accomplish what they set out to do? If not, why didn’t it work out as expected? 

Ian says you wouldn’t expect a team lead to care about OKRs; a team lead should be more concerned with measuring scrum.

Engagement surveys can be helpful for surfacing sentiment. But Ian doesn’t find them helpful for differentiating between a teams’ level of happiness versus its level of impact.

One-On-One Meetings Should Be Fluid and Unique

There’s much written about one-on-one meetings between managers and their employees, and rightfully so. It’s an important interaction for any coaching relationship. But a by-the-book approach to one-on-one meetings isn’t always a recipe for success. 

The thing to keep in mind is that there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to these meetings. One-on-ones should be about helping engineers find unique solutions to their unique problems, rather than trying to present a milquetoast solution. At times, you might need to play the role of advisor, listener or coach. A fluid approach that is authentically yours is best. 

Ian also recommends managers use open-ended questions to guide these conversations. For example, he’ll start a one-on-one meeting with something like, “Hey, someone else has this opinion about something that you are or aren’t doing, what do you think?” 

This opens up the conversation so that they don’t think that you’re attacking or trapping them. Instead, it helps them gain different perspectives on their career path or a work-related problem. 

How To Avoid Burnout Among Engineers and Managers

Lots of engineers tend to burn out in their twenties. But for Ian, it took a lot longer. It wasn’t until Ian was mid-career when he realized that his workload was no longer sustainable. 

He was taking on too much work, and was such a perfectionist that he couldn’t and wouldn’t delegate that work to other people. He had been working way too hard for too long. He felt a sense of powerlessness: Ian went from eager and motivated to unmotivated and uninspired.  

Eventually Ian realized that he had to slow down and find a solution to being overworked because he was, in fact, burned out. 

For managers, the best advice for avoiding burnout is to first focus on delegating as much as you can. This will free up more time for you to focus on avoiding misses. 

People grow through delegation — so you want to enable your direct reports to make the mistakes for themselves so that they can anticipate and avoid them next time (and hopefully not burn out in the process of learning this all). This article is based on an episode of Dev Interrupted, featuring expert guests from around the world to explore strategy and day-to-day topics ranging from dev team metrics to accelerating delivery.

Hear the full talk

This advice only scratches the surface of how organizations can make their business more efficient and productive. You can find out much more about the team-of-teams model and how it applies to business by listening to our podcast.

The typical model of business needs rethinking. Traditionally, businesses run in a rather industrial structure, almost militaristic. There are layers upon layers of management, with large gaps between the people who do the work and those who control the strategy. While this can work well in certain sectors, like manufacturing, it’s not ideal for a more innovative company.

So we talked to Bob Ritchie, VP of Software at SAIC, about an alternative way to structure business: the team-of-teams model. In this model, the leadership of the company creates smaller teams that manage themselves. And instead of presenting specific targets, the leadership gives each team a problem to solve. That can range from managing our customer service to making a new product.

“A top heavy and top-down micro-management ecosystem is just not what resonates today with knowledge work and thought work that an art form like software development is,” Bob says. “So the team of teams model presents a different concept. Instead of having this hierarchical command and control, the leadership strategy pivots to creating an environment where there’s a shared vision and a shared mission.”

-On the Dev Interrupted Podcast at 5:10

With more autonomy, teams are happier, more productive and work much more efficiently. But what do companies need to do to switch to this model?

Give autonomy through a shared vision

The first step is to make sure that the leadership team has a clear vision. What are you trying to achieve? This needs to be simple and summarize the ultimate aim of the company. Once you have that vision, everything else can begin to fall into place. You can allow teams to find their own way to an answer, which might be a solution you never would’ve dreamt of. Just make sure to give each team a set budget.

“Teams are granted a level of autonomy that then lets them define and discover their own purpose in where they fit in that vision,” Bob says. “Oftentimes it then provides invaluable feedback on how that vision needs to be altered based on what they’re seeing as opposed to that historical: I’m-just-being-told model.”

-On the Dev Interrupted Podcast at 5:47

This autonomy is key to the team-of-teams model. When you give creative and innovative people freedom to explore a problem, they’re much more likely to find a novel approach.

Give problems, not tasks

When you’ve brought together bright minds and talent, there’s no need to set specific tasks. You simply give the team a goal: a problem to solve. With small teams, they can easily organize themselves and make sure that they’re working productively. They might not solve it how you originally intended, but it’ll get solved.

“The Team of Teams model gives you that flexibility and I’m not telling you what to do, I’m giving you a problem to solve,” Bob says. “When it comes to execution in a dynamic landscape, Team of Teams is almost always better.”

Sure, in some situations like the medical world, there’s a definite correct answer. Things must happen in a set way. But Bob adds: 

“In the software world, I can’t think of a case where anyone knows the right answer … To say definitively: Build me exactly this in exactly this time and this will be your guaranteed result.”

-On the Dev Interrupted Podcast at 19:18

Keep only four levels of hierarchy

But if you’re only going to give people objectives, and not set tasks, you need to make sure that individual employees are never more than four steps away from the CEO. Too many layers in between the worker and the CEO causes problems. So if you start to get too many levels, it’s time to start breaking your teams down into smaller groups.

“There has to be that cohesion of vision and purpose, and as you add layers between the individual contributors on the team to that CEO’s vision, you start to dilute the messaging,” Bob says. “So when I say: ‘there’s a problem, go solve it.’ They have a frame of mind and you know what our organization is striving towards … It really prevents that communication breakdown.”

-On the Dev Interrupted Podcast at 15:39

Invest in your teams

Once you have your teams set up and can trust them to get on with a task, it’s time to start investing in them. Train them up. Help them grow as individuals and workers. Do that, and the whole team will improve.

“The foundational responsibility of leaders is to create an environment where your teams can thrive,” Bob says. “So I think continual learning is such an important dimension … If I don’t have the opportunity at work to find some level of mastery in a craft, I’m going to seek an opportunity where I can go get that.”

This is another reason why the old model doesn’t work. It makes people cogs in the machine, who don’t get those opportunities to master their craft and feel fulfilled.

“If you’re not, as a leader, investing in those teams to stay as sharp as possible, you’re doing a disservice to your teams. Eventually, your team skill sets are going to erode,” Bob says. “Carve out time for your folks to not only have access to content, but actually immerse in it.”

-On the Dev Interrupted Podcast at 20:50

Let teams self-police

When teams are set up correctly, and have a good mix of skills, they’ll choose their own leaders. Perhaps through a vote. They’ll also often decide among themselves whether someone needs more training or needs to leave the team for good.

“The team self-polices to some degree. So if something gets escalated, it’s only in the cases where the team hasn’t been able to self-adjudicate,” Bob explains on the Dev Interrupted Podcast at 8:44.

They’ll often elect their team leader, too. Which is good if someone wants to step back from that leadership role for a time or give someone else a chance to prove themselves. All these things are easier in the team-of-teams model. 

Stop looking for the perfect person

Another advantage of this model is that you don’t need to be looking for someone with all the skills. It’s often much easier to find an individual that slots neatly into a team, or five people that form a new team, than to find that one perfect person.

“Maybe it’s not the perfect person, but it’s a perfect fit on this team because of personalities and principles and values,” Bob says. “Even if they don’t become that perfect person that I was looking for, they’re still going to be a valuable contributor to that team.”

-On the Dev Interrupted Podcast at 32:31

It also makes it much easier to look for people who might need a little training, but you can always develop into a much stronger candidate. This opens up the pool of talent you have available to you.

Hear the full talk

This advice only scratches the surface of how organizations can make their business more efficient and productive. You can find out much more about the team-of-teams model and how it applies to business by listening to our podcast.

Learning to code doesn’t mean you have to become a programmer. Coding is one of those professions with a lot of transferable skills: logic, clear thinking, problem solving, and attention to detail, to name just a few. So learning a programming language can open up a whole range of opportunities, even if you decide to veer away from becoming a developer.

We spoke with Peter Bell, founder and CTO at CTO connection, on our podcast to see what avenues are open to those that learn how to program. Here’s what he said.

Be an individual contributor

If you enjoy programming, but don’t enjoy the management side of the role, then you’ll want to look into becoming an individual contributor (IC). An IC is someone who focuses on the actual programming, without any of the management responsibilities. In the past, this wasn’t a viable career path. But things have changed.

“It always used to be like: Hey, if you want to make more money and, you know, make your parents proud, then you've got to go become a manager and stop doing the thing you're actually good at. Which is writing code,” Peter explains. “So it's good that we've got the dual-track career path, now.”

-On the Dev Interrupted Podcast at 04:43

Now, if you want to focus solely on being a programmer, that’s a viable option.

Get into management

The fact that we now have a dual-track career path means that if you’re particularly extroverted or enjoy training others up, you can choose to head in that direction. Sure, you won’t be coding as much. But your coding knowledge will help make sure that you can train up your team, and understand what they need to work on.

On a similar vein, it’s worth considering overseeing an entire product. This is where you can take that extra step away and really think about the user experience. What makes the best sense for them? How should this piece of software work? How do all these pieces fit together? A product manager needs the skills of any manager, but also needs to be able to think about the actual experience.

“Somebody who has a solid technical background who moves into product, it's another way of scaling your impact, because now you can think about the user experience and the flows without having to be like: Dammit, I got the semi-colon in the wrong place,” Peter explains. “So you get what the geeks are talking about, but you can actually focus on the impact for the users... You can still talk thoughtfully about, you know, how are we going to run this in a Kubernetes cluster and how are we going to think about, you know, real time stream queries against the data source?” 

-On the Dev Interrupted Podcast at 05:06

Being able to take a step back away from the day-to-day coding can be great for those that enjoy reviewing code and looking for errors. When developing products, you won’t spend as much time writing new code, but you’ll get to think through the problems at a more abstract level.

Train or consults others

Another role, which can suit those that prefer the freelance life, is to move into training or consultancy. Companies are always looking to teach their staff about new techniques and languages. So if you have a knack for passing on your skills, you’ll be in high demand. In fact, Peter described on the podcast how he started off by writing blogs about ColdFusion. 

“I started presenting a technical conference around the US and around the world, and then I realized, once I got to a certain point, that people would pay me to do this,” Peter says. “I've been on the other side where I'm paying someone to come in and talk about Redis or whatever. And I'm always saying to myself: This is really expensive, but we're still paying for it.”

-On the Dev Interrupted Podcast at 06:36

Being able to pick up a new language or technology quickly is a skill that not many have. So if you can do it, you can easily go into consultancy or training and earn a substantial salary. For example, Peter explains that large companies will often pay between $10,000 and $15,000 for a single day training 30 engineers. If you can pull it off, and leave those engineers with the right skills, you only need a few jobs to make a good living.

Try being a sales engineer

If you’re someone who enjoys working with people and thinking about the overall architecture of a project, rather than the fiddly details, then you might have more impact if you become a sales engineer. This role is all about understanding a product inside and out, giving demos and presenting the facts. The best sales engineers are the knowledgeable ones.

“It’s this intersection between understanding computers and being able to speak to a human. And it’s a relatively rare trait,” Peter says. “It seems engineering is awesome because what you do is you get to go and hang out with other geeks, and understand their problems.”

-On the Dev Interrupted Podcast at 13:20

So rather than focusing on coding, then coming back in six months with a finished product, you get to have those high-level talks. What are your big pain points? What are the issues with your engineering flows? How might this tool or product reduce cycle time? Which can often be a lot more rewarding and enjoyable.

Check out the podcast

These are just some of the jobs that are available to you, once you know how to code. But if you’d like to hear more about what Peter talked about, listen to our podcast.

Starved for top-level software engineering content? Need some good tips on how to manage your team? This article is inspired by Dev Interrupted - the go-to podcast for engineering leaders.

Dev Interrupted features expert guests from around the world to explore strategy and day-to-day topics ranging from dev team metrics to accelerating delivery. With new guests every week from Google to small startups, the Dev Interrupted Podcast is a fresh look at the world of software engineering and engineering management.

Listen and subscribe on your streaming service of choice today.

Flow can mean many things but when it comes to workflow it usually refers to that feeling, discussed by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, when you enter a state of intense focus and lose yourself in an activity. 

Video games are a great example. They take advantage of this feeling to keep you immersed, which is why it’s so easy for gamers to “lose time” and just get wrapped up. The same feeling usually drives your most productive and best work.

When you manage developers, their workflow should be treasured and valued. That’s why, to improve developer focus, it’s vital to avoid weighing them down with minor interruptions or non-urgent pings. 

“Flow is characterized as this experience where the task that you're doing is perfectly matched to the skills that you have.”

-Katie Wilde on the Dev Interrupted Podcast at 7:51

1. Acknowledge that it take 23 minutes for devs just to get into flow

Did you know that it takes 23 minutes to get into a flow state? For some people it takes even longer. That means that for every question, disruption, email, and interruption that you or your coworkers are subjected to, it could be half an hour of productivity down the drain. We talked to Katie Wilde, VP of Engineering at Ambassador Labs, about how she manages workflow

“Say you got a Slack ping, and you're like, “oh, I'll just ask a question.” How long does it take you to find the thread again? What's that total interrupt time? It's 23 minutes…that's been measured.”

-on the Dev Interrupted Podcast at 11:11

2. Defrag dev calendars

Some interruptions are unavoidable but many of them aren’t. Planning your calendar in a way that works around the needs and workflows of your team is necessary to maximize everyone's productivity. 

For instance, scheduling meetings on days when weekly meetings already occur can help preserve focus time by not disrupting other working days. 

Devs need to communicate with their managers on what times they have available away from normal workflow and then it’s up to engineering leaders to plan around those schedules. As a dev leader, you have to look at your devs’ calendars, not your own, and react accordingly. 

“If you're a manager, when you're scheduling, don't look at your calendar, and then find a time and then see where you can slot the engineer in…look at the engineer's calendar and see, where can you tack the meeting on that it is after another meeting, or it is maybe at the start of the day, the end of the day… and ask them!”

-Katie Wilde on the Dev Interrupted Podcast at 12:31

3. Suck it up - schedule your work around focus time

When managing large numbers of devs, it can seem like a chore to work around many different schedules or attempting to get meetings done only on specific days. We asked Katie what her trick to juggling so many different calendars and meetings was, and she had one thing to say: “Suck it up.”

Devs are the backbone of software production and it’s important to prioritize their productivity whenever possible. To help them stay on task and be able to really focus on their work, they need to have meetings planned around their day - not yours.

Providing consistency for your devs - meeting them when they are ready, available, and focused - helps them maintain a flow state and maximize productivity. But more than that, it’s the right thing to do. Devs want to build cool stuff, not have their days ruined by their own calendars.   

Katie says it best:

“That might mean that, as the manager, you have a little bit weirder hours. I hate to say this, but kind of suck it up… There's no way to get around that.”

-on the Dev Interrupted Podcast at 13:23

Watch the full interview-

If you would like to hear more about how managers can work around a developers schedule and other great insight from Katie Wilde, check out the full podcast on your favorite podcasting application, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, YouTube. 

Starved for top-level software engineering content? Need some good tips on how to manage your team? This article is inspired by Dev Interrupted - the go-to podcast for engineering leaders.

Dev Interrupted features expert guests from around the world to explore strategy and day-to-day topics ranging from dev team metrics to accelerating delivery. With new guests every week from Google to small startups, the Dev Interrupted Podcast is a fresh look at the world of software engineering and engineering management.

Listen and subscribe on your streaming service of choice today.

Hiring neurodiverse developers can be challenging, particularly for smaller companies that are less experienced at hiring. This isn’t because you need an entirely new process or that neurodiverse people are inherently trickier to interview. It’s that small flaws in your hiring process get exacerbated. Obstacles that cause neurotypical people to stumble, become outright blockers to a neurodiverse person.

So we asked Matt Nigh, data engineering manager at UW Medicine, to give his tips on how to make sure your hiring process suits everybody.

“I think there are companies that other organizations could mimic,” Matt explained. “I would look at Google as one of probably the best that I’ve experienced.”

-On the Dev Interrupted Podcast at 25:50

1. Interview processes should be conversational

If you use a lot of formal language, jargon and needlessly complicated words, you’ll make it much harder for your interviewee to understand what you want them to do. It also makes the interview artificial and cold, which can lead to unnecessary stress and anxiety in your interviewee. This is true for everybody, but for a neurodiverse developer, it can be much more potent.

“The most inclusive interview process I ever experienced was at Google,” Matt said. “And the reason I felt they had such an inclusive process is that it was wildly conversational. They were incredibly good at explaining what they were asking and what they were looking for. And to me, it was an incredibly friendly process.”

-On the Dev Interrupted Podcast at 24:10

2. Neurodiverse developers prefer straightforward and clear instructions 

When giving instructions, particularly in practical tests, it’s important to make sure that you’re being clear and straightforward. Leaving ambiguity can cause problems, especially for neurodiverse developers. That ambiguity can distract away from the actual task at hand. The clearer your instructions, the better you’ll test a developer’s actual skills.

“I would say the reason I failed the system design interview was (and this is an example of what autism will do during an interview) it was the first system design interview I ever had. And I spent half the time trying to understand the language that the individual was using, rather than solving the problem, trying to make sure we’re just on the same page with what we were saying,” Matt said.

-On the Dev Interrupted Podcast at 24:40

3. Neurodiverse developers need diverse recruiters, and stick around for longer once hired

Everyone has their own biases. While we should all strive to overcome those, it’s not always possible. The best way to avoid those problems is to make sure your interview team is diverse. Some coping mechanisms and strategies can seem strange to a neurotypical recruiter at first.

For example, someone with ADHD might ask you to repeat points or be typing as you speak. While it could initially look like they’re answering emails or not paying attention to you, it’s more likely that they’re taking notes to make sure they follow your instructions properly. The more diverse your recruiters, the fewer false assumptions you’ll make.

“Most recruiters are used to looking at neurotypical applicants, and they essentially have mental flags that come up with certain things, certain questions or anything like that,” Matt said. “Companies should ask: Do I have inclusive recruiters? So say, for example, at Google, they had incredibly inclusive recruiters. I was recruited by a deaf individual, for example. So this person very clearly understands me and anything that was going on.”

-On the Dev Interrupted Podcast at 25:13

4. Neurodiverse developers could be more productive, and worth changing your processes

A program at Hewlett Packard Enterprise hired over 30 neurodiverse people in software testing roles at Australia’s Department of Human Services. The initial results from the program seem to suggest that those testing teams are 30% more productive than others, according to an article in the Harvard Business Review, called neurodiversity as a competitive advantage.

It would seem that, while a neurodiverse person might struggle in some areas—like the social anxiety brought on by an interview—they could exceed in others, such as pattern recognition.

Watch the full interview

If you’d like to hear more from Matt on neurodiversity in software development, you can watch the full podcast on our channel.

Starved for top-level software engineering content? Need some good tips on how to manage your team? This article is inspired by Dev Interrupted - the go-to podcast for engineering leaders.

Dev Interrupted features expert guests from around the world to explore strategy and day-to-day topics ranging from dev team metrics to accelerating delivery. With new guests every week from Google to small startups, the Dev Interrupted Podcast is a fresh look at the world of software engineering and engineering management.

Listen and subscribe on your streaming service of choice today.

Over the last ten years, technology has become more sophisticated. Faster. Smaller. More powerful. But it isn’t just our technology that’s evolving at a rapid pace. Our culture, attitudes and politics are all changing, too.

So what could the next ten years look like? How might businesses change to keep up with technology? We spoke with Jason Warner, managing director at Redpoint Ventures, to get his thoughts on the matter.

“Ten years is an interestingly long, but also short time horizon,” Jason explained. “It’s likely we’ll see a complete company cycle, maybe two macroeconomic cycles.”

-On the Dev Interrupted Podcast at 10:29

1. Organizations will invest more in compliance and security

There have been a lot of large changes in recent years. People are working from home. Political tensions are high. And almost every device collects data about us. In all these cases, security is important. Securing our businesses, our national secrets, and our private lives.

It all leads to an inevitable conclusion. Jason believes that chief compliance officers will become commonplace, even in small companies. Protecting data is going to become a primary concern, for governments, businesses and people. Because, as the world gets more digital, we’re going to see more and more cyber attacks.

“Trends that I see happening are an increased awareness and investment in things like compliance and security. I think that if companies don’t have a chief compliance officer now, they likely will in the future,” Jason said. “I think it’s interesting when you see the geopolitical environment of how we might have to invest in more sophisticated tooling for national security. But more than that, it’s like understanding that we’re no longer a single micro-geo unit called the United States.”

- On the Dev Interrupted Podcast at 11:03

2. Companies will focus on loyalty and subscriptions over one-off sales

The standard business model is outdated. In the past, technology companies sold software, they gave customers the software and that was the end of the transaction. But now, it’s more about building communities and regular interaction with your customers. It’s about subscriptions, regular payments or even donation models, seen on popular platforms like Twitch. Software isn’t a product any more. It’s a service.

But almost every company these days is a technology company. Just look at what’s happened to the taxi industry. The model has completely changed, simply because the technology has evolved. The old model won’t completely disappear, but we’ll see more and more industries move into a subscription model as new technology takes over.

“Selling is about adoption first and selling second. Someone’s got to reach for you first,” Jason explained. “Then, they’re going to find a value problem, then they’re going to want to give you money if they’re finding utility out of you.”

- On the Dev Interrupted Podcast at 11:21

3. Hardware is, and always will be, just as important as software

With every new innovation, we place more demands on the hardware we’re using. The more advanced our software becomes, the more powerful our hardware must be. But right now, most  companies rely on international trade to build key components. With tensions rising, it’s likely that we’ll see companies begin to bring these resources closer to home, securing their supply chain in the process.

“There’s interestingly a lot more emphasis on investing in hardware again,” Jason said. “And America in particular owning its hardware manufacturing, which I think is obviously good.”

-On the Dev Interrupted Podcast 11:41

Watch the full interview

If you’re interested in what else Jason had to say about the next ten years, and what challenges society faces, you can watch the full podcast on our site.

Starved for top-level software engineering content? Need some good tips on how to manage your team? This article is inspired by Dev Interrupted - the go-to podcast for engineering leaders.

Dev Interrupted features expert guests from around the world to explore strategy and day-to-day topics ranging from dev team metrics to accelerating delivery. With new guests every week from Google to small startups, the Dev Interrupted Podcast is a fresh look at the world of software engineering and engineering management.

Listen and subscribe on your streaming service of choice today.

At Netflix, we don’t just think about productivity - we engineer it. There’s an entire team within Netflix dedicated to productivity. I lead the Develop Domain along with my Delivery and Observability Domain peers, and together, we make up Productivity Engineering.

I recently sat down with the Dev Interrupted podcast to discuss all things productivity, how I run my team, and how other managers should view employee success. Here’s how we think about it at Netflix:

Can productivity be engineered?

In short, yes! Productivity is not a generic term for team performance or a perfunctory buzzword used during team meetings. The productivity team is an actual organization. The work we do is foundational to Netflix’s development teams. Productivity Engineering lives within the broader, central Platform organization.

The role of the Productivity Engineering team is simple: we exist to make the lives of Netflix developers easier. Abstracting away the various “Netflix-isms” around development, delivery, and observability, productivity allows devs more time to focus on their domain of expertise. 

“We are sort of like the nerds’ nerds, if you will, enabling them to use our platforms and tools so that the work that they're doing is focused on studio and streaming, without thinking about everything that's under the hood.” - On the Dev Interrupted Podcast at 2:31

With the recent addition of Gaming to the list of Netflix’s pursuits, the resulting focus becomes even more important.

Practically speaking, it’s the role of Productivity Engineering to help with things like coding, testing, debugging, dependency management, deployment, alerting, monitoring, performance, incident response, to name a bunch. Netflix utilizes the concept of a “paved road,” the frameworks, platforms, apps, and tools we build and support to keep our devs rolling. The idea is to keep workflows streamlined and enable developers to operate as efficiently and effectively as possible. If the road ahead is cleared of obstacles, you’re going to get to where you need to go faster and with support along the way. 

It’s also about helping developers enjoy the ride. To abuse another metaphor, a sound engineering experience should be like dining at a fine restaurant. If done right, you rarely remember the waitstaff, have a hard time finding something you like, or worry about how they prepared the food; you simply enjoy the experience. If Productivity Engineering is doing their job, they act as the restaurant and waitstaff with developers as the customer, providing nothing short of a beautiful end-to-end experience. 

Measuring Outcomes vs. Output

Measuring all of that productivity can be hard, and there’s no one unicorn measurement to rule them all. Hence, developer productivity teams should focus on impact and outcomes. Above all, Netflix focuses on customer satisfaction. Our philosophy is that while how something is delivered is important, the impact of what’s delivered is ultimately of greater importance. 

"If you're running around a track super-fast, but you're on the wrong track, does it matter? So really, what are you delivering? How you're delivering is important. But if that thing that you're delivering is ultimately doing what you want it to do, that's the most important thing."

- On the Dev Interrupted Podcast at 5:05

In this model, the outcome always wins over output or activity. For instance, standard productivity deployment metrics (DORA) as applied to our customers become an important proxy for measuring our success. Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for productivity are viewed as a reflection of a team’s performance as it relates to customer satisfaction.

I’m a big fan of the SPACE framework, developed by Nicole Forsgren, for precisely this reason. How are our customers doing in terms of Satisfaction, Performance, Activity, Communication, and Efficiency? The answer to those questions reflects how we’re doing as a Productivity organization.

"This is our strategy, these are our hypotheses around, how we're going to improve our customers' productivity. Are those things paying off? And if you can't measure them in some way, who knows? Right? So yeah, we're getting a little more hardcore about this."

- On the Dev Interrupted Podcast at 24:17

Key metrics provide productivity teams with a holistic view of performance by establishing benchmarks. Understanding that everything needs to be viewed within the proper context, it’s difficult to improve as an organization if nothing is measured or tracked. 

Comparing Productivity 

Comparing developers’ productivity across teams is a thorny subject at best and downright dangerous for team morale at worst. As the old saying goes, “Comparison is the thief of joy” or what I typically say, “comparisons lead to unhappiness”, or with my kids “eyes on your own paper!”. 

The productivity teams at Netflix take a contextualized view of dev teams rather than relying solely on raw data. Every project is different, the customer base is different, the use case is different, personas are different, and where a team is within the software development life cycle is different.

It’s a basic understanding that comparing apples to oranges is not good math. A team that is just starting out and building something new, is going to look very different than a team with a mature product. By recognizing this, it becomes almost impossible to rank teams against each other because very rarely, if ever, will teams be doing the same thing, in the same space, the same way, with the same people. 

Even a measurement of an outcome pertaining to customer satisfaction (CSAT) is not straightforward. At Netflix and across the industry, we’ve found that satisfaction for internal teams skews lower than satisfaction for customer-facing teams.

The reason? Teams within Netflix are their own harshest critics. When attempting to gauge the performance of an internal team vs a customer-facing team, it’s understood that the internal team is almost always going to score lower on satisfaction, even if both teams are equally effective. 

Context is everything. Measuring productivity means being mindful of context. 

Pushing Productivity 

Any company that wants to be successful must understand how to measure its success. Productivity doesn’t count for much if an organization is not moving towards desired outcomes. 

By viewing productivity as more than just a concept or a raw set of data, the hard-working teams at Netflix have turned productivity into an actual apparatus. It is a living, breathing team of human beings whose devotion to empathetic efficiency improves customer satisfaction and dev team quality of life. I am incredibly proud to lead these teams, and I sincerely hope the work we do inspires other organizations to improve their developers’ experience.

And if you want to be as productive as Netflix, remember that metrics are only as good as their context! 

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