The Five Dimensions of High-Performing Product Engineering Teams
How to Build Kickass Engineering Teams That Drive Success
What distinguishes the victors from the vanquished in technology-driven startups? Why do some teams achieve remarkable exits while others languish, gradually depleting their VC funding? The success of many of these companies hinges on the performance of their engineering teams. Without them, projects suffer from poor quality, delays, or worse—remain unrealized.
The term 'high-performing' is frequently used, but what does it truly signify? What defines not only a high-performing individual but a high-performing team? While opinions vary, I propose that high-performance can be gauged across these critical dimensions:
Business Impact: The dollars and cents driven by your team’s efforts.
Delivery: Consistently shipping with speed, quality, and predictability.
Operational Excellence: Systematically improving operational processes for enhanced reliability.
Ownership: Putting your name on your work. You drive - you’re not along for the ride.
Team Growth: People and the overall team continually improves.
These dimensions collectively define what it takes for engineering teams to excel and drive lasting success in technology-driven businesses. Let’s dive into each of these in more detail!
1. Business Impact
Don’t be the team that does a lot, but accomplishes little. High-performing teams consistently produce business impactful results that move the company forward. Period. This is the paramount measure of a high performing team. High performing teams don’t code just to code or spend their time exploring the Next Cool Thing™ - they use their technical skills as a conduit to material contribution to the broader business strategy. High performing teams leverage data to guide their decisions, ensuring that their efforts are focused on the most impactful areas. This approach helps in measuring success and making informed adjustments.
Key Practices:
Business Goal Alignment: Teams set clear, achievable goals that align with organizational objectives - and meet most of them. They understand and feel empowered to impact the business. For example, Google's OKR (Objectives and Key Results) Framework helps teams focus and align on impactful outcomes.
Lead with Data: Define and track key performance indicators (KPIs) that align with business goals. Prioritize analytics to gather insights into user behavior and system performance.
2. Delivery
Without good delivery, your team will be known as the one that sets lofty goals, but always seems to be playing catch-up. High performing teams are strong executors. They deliver business value efficiently, being able to move fast, while still maintaining high quality standards. Yes, it is possible to achieve both! Their output is predictable and consistent and communicated well to all stakeholders.
Key Practices:
Incremental, Risk Managed Delivery: Break down large projects into smaller, manageable increments that can be delivered quickly without compromising quality. Plan releases with risk management in mind, including thorough testing and a clear rollback strategy. This approach allows for faster feedback and continuous improvement.
Engineering Excellence: Teams hold themselves to a high technical standard and are able to deliver value quickly while maintaining those standards. They follow good code and software design patterns. Teams design software that is maintainable and scalable, avoiding over-engineering.
3. Operational Excellence
In the absence of Operational Excellence, your team will be seen as erratic with the term “on fire” getting weekly or even (gulp) daily usage. Teams with strong operational excellence optimize the software development lifecycle to ensure high-quality, reliable, and efficient software delivery. This involves engineering excellence in development, testing, and release standards, observability driven development, rigorous incident response processes, and commitment to continuous improvement. Put simply, it means your team has a well-defined process that you follow religiously and that you’re always looking around the corner for ways in which that process could fail. That process should allow the team to run smoothly, even in the absence of key individuals. An example of a software team excelling in operational excellence is the Netflix engineering team, known for their comprehensive monitoring systems and intentional monkey wrench throwing aka “Chaos Engineering”, which ensure seamless and reliable streaming services for hundreds millions of users (and millions of password sharers) worldwide.
Key Practices:
Observability Driven Development (ODD): Teams have a command on the monitoring and observability of their systems and a best practice here is employing Observability Driven Development. ODD is a software engineering approach that shifts monitoring and observability left into the development process, ensuring developers think about observability before writing any code, planning how to monitor and trace the new features they are implementing. It focuses on making systems transparent and easy to measure, so engineers can understand and diagnose how their applications behave in real-time. By adding detailed metrics, logs, and traces to the code, ODD helps teams quickly find and fix issues. This proactive method improves system reliability and performance while also providing valuable insights for ongoing improvement and optimization of software systems.
Incident Response: Teams have rigorous incident response processes that ensure incidents are handled swiftly and systematically, minimizing downtime and improving overall system reliability. Downtime is minimized and service reliability is maintained. Google's Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) practices are a benchmark in this area.
Continuous Improvement: Teams continuously learn from and refine their processes and systems.
4. Ownership
A lack of ownership means “throwing the ball over the fence” rather than driving home a solution. High performing teams exude ownership. It’s part of their DNA. Ownership is the accountability that team members demonstrate towards their work and the overall success of the project, team, and company. Strong owners are drivers - they take responsibility for their team’s work, they feel a strong sense of accountability for the business success, and are proactive about solving problems and raising the bar. In high performing product engineering teams, team members also “own” the product and act like product owners.
Key Practices:
Build A Team of Owners and Drivers. Frank Slootman, CEO of Snowflake, has famously quote in his book Amp It Up, “Hire drivers, not passengers.” Frank describes drivers as “people who make things happen, who move dials, who stop at literally nothing.” In his experience at successfully growing companies, high-performing teams are primarily made up of owners and drivers, not passengers. Coach your people to be owners and drivers, only hire drivers, and reduce or eliminate the passengers. And remember, a team can only be as strong as its leader and people within it. Managers need to start with leading by example and model the ownership/driver behavior they want to see from their teams.
Universal Accountability: Universal accountability is a team culture where each team member feels a strong sense of accountability for the team and business success versus simply focusing on their own success. In this culture, team members all hold each other to a higher standard.
Product Knowledge: In weaker teams, I often see engineering view product strategy and roadmapping as the “PM job.” Such engineers wait to be told what to build and tend to be blocked in moving the business or product forward without PM help. Consistently business impactful engineers are also product owners - these engineering teams have strong knowledge of the business and metrics, obsess over the products they own, and deeply understand its users. They work closely with product managers to ideate and develop product strategies and can seamlessly step in to drive a product feature as needed.
5. Growth
Without pushing your team to constantly grow, high performers will become bored, morale will atrophy, and progress will stagnate. High-performing teams are always growing and evolving. This is not a growth in numbers, but more a growth in skill and excellence. The team itself continually improves and the team members within them show continual advancement in their careers and skill sets. Team members are engaged and positive. Generally, team members can join and leave the team with limited disruption to the team’s business impact.
Key Practices:
Career Development: Managers must actively invest in the growth of their people. Track their career goals, progress against them, and proactively speak about them in your 1-1s.
Innovation: Teams have the ability to meet goals, while making space for creative thinking and investing in innovation to grow sustainable business impact. Provide opportunities for team members to “bubble-up” ideas that could ultimately be accepted by the business as the next priority to focus on. In Path to High Performing Teams article, Will Larson, CTO of Carta and previously Stripe, discusses the importance of a team’s marker in getting to the Innovation stage.
Conclusion
Managing people to be good performers is hard, but managing a team or even harder, a org of teams, to high-performance is even harder. Every day is a chance for the team to improve in some areas while taking a step back in others. It is your job to be fighting Parkinson’s Law, performance atrophy, and overcome the many trials and tribulations faced by engineering managers.
One of the expectation of an engineering leader is to create systems to constantly reassessing the performance of their team(s) through the lens of these 5 dimensions - Business Impact, Delivery, Operational Excellence, Ownership, and Team Growth - on a regular basis. If you start with these guiding principles for guiding performance, I am confident you’ll be far better off than the majority of those who get caught flat-footed when they step into the realm of leadership.
Looking Ahead in 2024
I know first hand how difficult it is to figure out how to assess the performance of your team, and from there, create a strategy to improve it and your system to regularly monitor. That is why very little engineering leaders do this well.
To help quicken the learning curve, I am working on a few things:
A toolkit based on this 5 Dimensions framework to help engineering managers (1) Assess the current state of their team and (2) Create a system to continually assess team performance and spot smoke.
Follow-up articles diving deeper into each of the 5 Dimensions with practical action steps to apply them.
My goal is to have a resource to share by end of 2024 and will share a post when they are available. Subscribe to my substack to stay updated.