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In the ever-changing world of software development, tracking progress and gaining insights into your projects is crucial. While GitHub Analytics provides developers and teams with valuable data-driven intelligence, relying solely on GitHub data may not provide the full picture needed for making informed decisions. By integrating GitHub Analytics with JIRA, engineering teams can gain a more comprehensive view of their development workflows, enabling them to take more meaningful actions.
GitHub Analytics offers valuable insights into:
However, GitHub Analytics primarily focuses on repository activity and code contributions. It lacks visibility into broader project management aspects such as sprint progress, backlog prioritization, and cross-team dependencies. This limited perspective can hinder a team's ability to understand the complete picture of their development workflow and make informed decisions.
JIRA is a widely used platform for issue tracking, sprint planning, and agile project management. When combined with GitHub Analytics, it creates a powerful ecosystem that:
Start leveraging the power of integrated analytics with tools like Typo, a dynamic platform designed to optimize your GitHub and JIRA experience. Whether you're working on a startup project or managing an enterprise-scale development team, such tools can offers powerful analytics tools tailored to your specific needs.
While GitHub Analytics is a valuable tool for tracking repository activity, integrating it with JIRA unlocks deeper engineering insights, allowing teams to make smarter, data-driven decisions. By bridging the gap between code contributions and project management, teams can improve efficiency, enhance collaboration, and ensure that engineering efforts align with business goals.
Whether you aim to enhance software delivery, improve team collaboration, or refine project workflows, Typo provides a flexible, data-driven platform to meet your needs.
1. How to integrate GitHub with JIRA for better analytics?
2. What are some common challenges in integrating JIRA with Github?
3. How can I ensure the accuracy of data in my integrated GitHub and JIRA analytics?
Tired of code reviews disrupting your workflow? As developers know, pull request reviews are crucial for software quality, but they often lead to context switching and time-consuming interruptions. That's why Typo, is excited to announce powerful new feature designed to empower reviewers: AI-Generated PR Summaries with Estimated Time to Review Label. This feature is built to minimize interruptions, save time, and ultimately, make your life as a reviewer significantly easier.
Imagine knowing exactly how much time a pull request (PR) will take to review. No more guessing, no more unexpected time sinks. Typo's Estimated Time to Review Labels provide a clear, data-driven estimate of the review effort required.
Time is a precious commodity for developers. Typo's AI-Generated PR Summaries provide a concise and insightful overview of code changes, allowing reviewers to quickly grasp the key modifications without wading through every line of code.
These two features work together to create a more efficient and less disruptive code review process. By providing time estimates and AI-powered summaries, Typo empowers reviewers to:
Typo helps developers maintain focus and save time, even when faced with incoming PR reviews.
Try Typo today and experience the benefits of AI-powered time estimates and summaries. Streamline your processes, boost productivity, and empower your development team.
Nowadays, software development teams face immense pressure to deliver high-quality products rapidly. To navigate this complexity, organizations must embrace data-driven decision-making. This is where software development metrics become crucial. By carefully selecting and tracking the right software KPIs, teams can gain valuable insights into their performance, identify areas for improvement, and ultimately achieve their goals.
Software metrics provide a wealth of information that can be used to:
Several software development metrics are considered critical for measuring team performance and driving success. These include:
To effectively leverage software development metrics, teams should:
Software metrics and measures in software architecture play a crucial role in evaluating the quality and maintainability of software systems. Key metrics include:
A comprehensive quality metrics in software engineering template should include:
Software development metrics examples can include:
By carefully selecting and tracking the right software engineering KPIs, teams can gain valuable insights into their performance, identify areas for improvement, and ultimately deliver higher-quality software more efficiently.
Platform engineering teams play a crucial role in enabling software development teams to deliver high-quality products faster. By providing self-service infrastructure, automating processes, and streamlining workflows, platform engineering teams empower developers to focus on building innovative solutions.
To effectively fulfill this mission, platform engineering teams must also leverage software development KPIs and software development lifecycle insights. Here are some key ways they do it:
By carefully analyzing different KPIs and SDLC insights, platform engineering teams can continuously improve their services, enhance developer productivity, and ultimately contribute to the overall success of the organization.
These tech giants heavily rely on tracking software development KPIs to drive continuous improvement and maintain their competitive edge. Here are some real-world examples:
By leveraging data-driven insights from these KPIs, these companies can continuously optimize their development processes, boost team productivity, improve product quality, and deliver exceptional user experiences.
By embracing best-practice KPI settings for software development and leveraging SEI tools you can unlock the full potential of the software engineering metrics for business success.
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In today's fast-paced software development world, tracking progress and understanding project dynamics is crucial. GitHub Analytics transforms raw data from repositories into actionable intelligence, offering insights that enable teams to optimize workflows, enhance collaboration, and improve software delivery. This guide explores the core aspects of GitHub Analytics, from key metrics to best practices, helping you leverage data to drive informed decision-making.
GitHub Analytics provides invaluable insights into project activity, empowering developers and project managers to track performance, identify bottlenecks, and enhance productivity. Unlike generic analytics tools, GitHub Analytics focuses on software development-specific metrics such as commits, pull requests, issue tracking, and cycle time analysis. This targeted approach allows for a deeper understanding of development workflows and enables teams to make data-driven decisions that directly impact project success.
GitHub Analytics encompasses a suite of metrics and tools that help developers assess repository activity and project health.
While other analytics platforms focus on user behavior or application performance, GitHub Analytics specifically tracks code contributions, repository health, and team collaboration, making it an indispensable tool for software development teams. This focus on development-specific data provides unique insights that are not readily available from generic analytics platforms.
GitHub Analytics tools like Typo are powerful tools for software teams, providing critical insights into development performance, collaboration, and project health. By embracing these analytics, teams can streamline workflows, enhance software quality, improve team communication, and make informed, data-driven decisions that ultimately lead to greater project success.
What if we told you that writing more code could be making you less productive?
While equating productivity with output is tempting, developer efficiency is far more complex. The real challenge often lies in processes, collaboration, and well-being. Without addressing these, inefficiencies and burnout will inevitably follow.
You may spend hours coding, only to feel your work isn’t making an impact—projects get delayed, bug fixes drag on, and constant context switching drains your focus. The key isn’t to work harder but smarter by solving the root causes of these issues.
The SPACE framework addresses this by focusing on five dimensions: Satisfaction, Performance, Activity, Communication, and Efficiency. It helps teams improve how much they do and how effectively they work, reducing workflow friction, improving collaboration, and supporting well-being to boost long-term productivity.
The space framework addresses five key dimensions of developer productivity: satisfaction and well-being, performance, activity, collaboration and communication, and efficiency and flow. Together, these dimensions provide a comprehensive view of how developers work and where improvements can be made, beyond just measuring output.
By taking these factors into account, teams can better support developers, helping them not only produce better work but also maintain their motivation and well-being. Let’s take a closer look at each part of the framework and how it can help your team achieve a balance between productivity and a healthy work environment.
In fast-paced, tech-driven environments, developers face several roadblocks to productivity:
The space framework helps identify and address these challenges by focusing on improving both the technical processes and the developer experience.
Let’s explore how each aspect of the space framework can directly impact technical teams:
Satisfaction and well-being
Developers are more productive when they feel engaged and valued. It's important to create an environment where developers are recognized for their contributions and have a healthy work-life balance. This can include feedback mechanisms, peer recognition, or even mental health initiatives. Automated tools that reduce repetitive tasks can also contribute to overall well-being.
Performance
Measuring performance should go beyond tracking the number of commits or pull requests. It’s about understanding the impact of the work being done. High-performing teams focus on delivering high-quality code and minimizing technical debt. Integrating automated testing and static code analysis tools into your CI/CD pipeline ensures code quality is maintained without manual intervention.
Activity
Focusing on meaningful developer activity, such as code reviews, tests written, and pull requests merged, helps align efforts with goals. Tools that track and visualize developer activities provide insight into how time is spent. For example, tracking code review completion times or how often changes are being pushed can reveal bottlenecks or opportunities for improving workflows.
Collaboration and communication
Effective communication across teams reduces friction in the development process. By integrating communication tools directly into the workflow, such as through Git or CI/CD notifications, teams can stay aligned on project goals. Automating feedback loops within the development process, such as notifications when builds succeed or fail, helps teams respond faster to issues.
Efficiency and flow
Developers enter a “flow state” when they can work on a task without distractions. One way to foster this is by reducing manual tasks and interruptions. Implementing CI/CD tools that automate repetitive tasks—like build testing or deployments—frees up developers to focus on writing code. It’s also important to create dedicated time blocks where developers can work without interruptions, helping them enter and maintain that flow.
To make the space framework actionable, here are some practical strategies your team can implement:
A large portion of developer time is spent on tasks that can easily be automated, such as code formatting, linting, and testing. By introducing tools that handle these tasks automatically, developers can focus on the more meaningful aspects of their work, like writing new features or fixing bugs. This is where tools like Typo can make a difference. Typo integrates seamlessly into your development process, ensuring that code adheres to best practices by automating code quality checks and providing real-time feedback. Automating these reviews reduces the time developers spend on manual reviews and ensures consistency across the codebase.
Instead of focusing on superficial metrics like lines of code written or hours logged, focus on tracking activities that lead to tangible progress. Typo, for example, helps track key metrics like the number of pull requests merged, the percentage of code coverage, or the speed at which developers address code reviews. These insights give team leads a clearer picture of where bottlenecks are occurring and help teams prioritize tasks that move the project forward.
Miscommunication between developers, product managers, and QA teams can cause delays and frustration. Integrating feedback systems that provide automatic notifications when tests fail or builds succeed can significantly improve collaboration. Typo plays a role here by streamlining communication between teams. By automatically reporting code review statuses or deployment readiness, Typo ensures that everyone stays informed without the need for constant manual updates or status meetings.
Protecting developer flow is essential to maintaining efficiency. Schedule dedicated “flow” periods where meetings are minimized, and developers can focus solely on their tasks. Typo enhances this by minimizing the need for developers to leave their coding environment to check on build statuses or review feedback. With automated reports, developers can stay updated without disrupting their focus. This helps ensure that developers can spend more time in their flow state and less time on administrative tasks.
Using metrics from tools like Typo, you can gain visibility into where delays are happening in your development process—whether it's slow code review cycles, inefficient testing processes, or unclear requirements. With this insight, you can make targeted improvements, such as adjusting team structures, automating manual testing processes, or dedicating more resources to code reviews to ensure smoother project progression.
By using Typo as part of your workflow, you can naturally align with many of the principles of the space framework:
The space framework offers a well-rounded approach to improving developer productivity and well-being. By focusing on automating repetitive tasks, improving collaboration, and fostering uninterrupted flow time, your team can achieve more without sacrificing quality or developer satisfaction. Tools like Typo naturally fit into this process, helping teams streamline workflows, enhance communication, and maintain high code quality.
If you’re looking to implement the space framework, start by automating repetitive tasks and protecting your developers' flow time. Gradually introduce improvements in collaboration and tracking meaningful activity. Over time, you’ll notice improvements in both productivity and the overall well-being of your development team.
What challenges are you facing in your development workflow?
Share your experiences and let us know how tools like Typo could help your team implement the space framework to improve productivity and collaboration!
Schedule a demo with Typo today!
In today's fast-paced and rapidly evolving software development landscape, effective project management is crucial for engineering teams striving to meet deadlines, deliver quality products, and maintain customer satisfaction. Project management not only ensures that tasks are completed on time but also optimizes resource allocation enhances team collaboration, and improves communication across all stakeholders. A key tool that has gained prominence in this domain is JIRA, which is widely recognized for its robust features tailored for agile project management.
However, while JIRA offers numerous advantages, such as customizable workflows, detailed reporting, and integration capabilities with other tools, it also comes with limitations that can hinder its effectiveness. For instance, teams relying solely on JIRA dashboard gadget may find themselves missing critical contextual data from the development process. They may obtain a snapshot of project statuses but fail to appreciate the underlying issues impacting progress. Understanding both the strengths and weaknesses of JIRA dashboard gadget is vital for engineering managers to make informed decisions about their project management strategies.
JIRA dashboard gadgets primarily focus on issue tracking and project management, often missing critical contextual data from the development process. While JIRA can show the status of tasks and issues, it does not provide insights into the actual code changes, commits, or branch activities that contribute to those tasks. This lack of context can lead to misunderstandings about project progress and team performance. For example, a task may be marked as "in progress," but without visibility into the associated Git commits, managers may not know if the team is encountering blockers or if significant progress has been made. This disconnect can result in misaligned expectations and hinder effective decision-making.
JIRA dashboards having road map gadget or sprint burndown gadget can sometimes present a static view of project progress, which may not reflect real-time changes in the development process. For instance, while a JIRA road map gadget or sprint burndown gadget may indicate that a task is "done," it does not account for any recent changes or updates made in the codebase. This static nature can hinder proactive decision-making, as managers may not have access to the most current information about the project's health. Additionally, relying on historical data can create a lag in response to emerging issues in issue statistics gadget. In a rapidly changing development environment, the ability to react quickly to new information is crucial for maintaining project momentum hence we need to move beyond default chart gadget like road map gadget or burndown chart gadget.
Collaboration is essential in software development, yet JIRA dashboards often do not capture the collaborative efforts of the team. Metrics such as code reviews, pull requests, and team discussions are crucial for understanding how well the team is working together. Without this information, managers may overlook opportunities for improvement in team dynamics and communication. For example, if a team is actively engaged in code reviews but this activity is not reflected in JIRA gadgets or sprint burndown gadget, managers may mistakenly assume that collaboration is lacking. This oversight can lead to missed opportunities to foster a more cohesive team environment and improve overall productivity.
JIRA dashboard or other copy dashboard can sometimes encourage a focus on individual performance metrics rather than team outcomes. This can foster an environment of unhealthy competition, where developers prioritize personal achievements over collaborative success. Such an approach can undermine team cohesion and lead to burnout. When individual metrics are emphasized, developers may feel pressured to complete tasks quickly, potentially sacrificing code quality and collaboration. This focus on personal performance can create a culture where teamwork and knowledge sharing are undervalued, ultimately hindering project success.
JIRA dashboard layout often rely on predefined metrics and reports, which may not align with the unique needs of every project or team. This inflexibility can result in a lack of relevant insights that are critical for effective project management. For example, a team working on a highly innovative project may require different metrics than a team maintaining legacy software. The inability to customize reports can lead to frustration and a sense of disconnect from the data being presented.
Integrating Git data with JIRA provides a more holistic view of project performance and developer productivity. Here’s how this integration can enhance insights:
By connecting Git repositories with JIRA, engineering managers can gain real-time visibility into commits, branches, and pull requests associated with JIRA issues & issue statistics. This integration allows teams to see the actual development work being done, providing context to the status of tasks on the JIRA dashboard gadet. For instance, if a developer submits a pull request that relates to a specific JIRA ticket, the project manager instantly knows that work is ongoing, fostering transparency. Additionally, automated notifications for changes in the codebase linked to JIRA issues keep everyone updated without having to dig through multiple tools. This integrated approach ensures that management has a clear understanding of actual progress rather than relying on static task statuses.
Integrating Git data with JIRA facilitates better collaboration among team members. Developers can reference JIRA issues in their commit messages, making it easier for the team to track changes related to specific tasks. This transparency fosters a culture of collaboration, as everyone can see how their work contributes to the overall project goals. Moreover, by having a clear link between code changes and JIRA issues, team members can engage in more meaningful discussions during stand-ups and retrospectives. This enhanced communication can lead to improved problem-solving and a stronger sense of shared ownership over the project.
With integrated Git and JIRA data, engineering managers can identify potential risks more effectively. By monitoring commit activity and pull requests alongside JIRA issue statuses, managers can spot trends and anomalies that may indicate project delays or technical challenges. For example, if there is a sudden decrease in commit activity for a specific task, it may signal that the team is facing challenges or blockers. This proactive approach allows teams to address issues before they escalate, ultimately improving project outcomes and reducing the likelihood of last-minute crises.
The combination of JIRA and Git data enables more comprehensive reporting and analytics. Engineering managers can analyze not only task completion rates but also the underlying development activity that drives those metrics. This deeper understanding can inform better decision-making and strategic planning for future projects. For instance, by analyzing commit patterns and pull request activity, managers can identify trends in team performance and areas for improvement. This data-driven approach allows for more informed resource allocation and project planning, ultimately leading to more successful outcomes.
To maximize the benefits of integrating Git data with JIRA, engineering managers should consider the following best practices:
Choose integration tools that fit your team's specific needs. Tools like Typo can facilitate the connection between Git and JIRA smoothly. Additionally, JIRA integrates directly with several source control systems, allowing for automatic updates and real-time visibility.
If you’re ready to enhance your project delivery speed and predictability, consider integrating Git data with your JIRA dashboards. Explore Typo! We can help you do this in a few clicks & make it one of your favorite dashboards.
Encourage your team to adopt consistent commit message guidelines. Including JIRA issue keys in commit messages will create a direct link between the code change and the JIRA issue. This practice not only enhances traceability but also aids in generating meaningful reports and insights. For example, a commit message like 'JIRA-123: Fixed the login issue' can help managers quickly identify relevant commits related to specific tasks.
Leverage automation features available in both JIRA and Git platforms to streamline the integration process. For instance, set up automated triggers that update JIRA issues based on events in Git, such as moving a JIRA issue to 'In Review' once a pull request is submitted in Git. This reduces manual updates and alleviates the administrative burden on the team.
Providing adequate training to your team ensures everyone understands the integration process and how to effectively use both tools together. Conduct workshops or create user guides that outline the key benefits of integrating Git and JIRA, along with tips on how to leverage their combined functionalities for improved workflows.
Implement regular check-ins to assess the effectiveness of the integration. Gather feedback from team members on how well the integration is functioning and identify any pain points. This ongoing feedback loop allows you to make incremental improvements, ensuring the integration continues to meet the needs of the team.
Create comprehensive dashboards that visually represent combined metrics from both Git and JIRA. Tools like JIRA dashboards, Confluence, or custom-built data visualization platforms can provide a clearer picture of project health. Metrics can include the number of active pull requests, average time in code review, or commit activity relevant to JIRA task completion.
With the changes being reflected in JIRA, create a culture around regular code reviews linked to specific JIRA tasks. This practice encourages collaboration among team members, ensures code quality, and keeps everyone aligned with project objectives. Regular code reviews also lead to knowledge sharing, which strengthens the team's overall skill set.
To illustrate the benefits of integrating Git data with JIRA, let’s consider a case study of a software development team at a company called Trackso.
Trackso, a remote monitoring platform for Solar energy, was developing a new SaaS platform that consisted of a diverse team of developers, designers, and project managers. The team relied heavily on JIRA for tracking project statuses, but they found their productivity hampered by several issues:
In 2022, Trackso's engineering manager decided to integrate Git data with JIRA. They chose GitHub for version control, given its robust collaborative features. The team set up automatic links between their JIRA tickets and corresponding GitHub pull requests and standardized their commit messages to include JIRA issue keys.
After implementing the integration, Trackso experienced significant improvements within three months:
Despite these successes, Trackso faced challenges during the integration process:
While JIRA dashboards are valuable tools for project management, they are insufficient on their own for engineering managers seeking to improve project delivery speed and predictability. By integrating Git data with JIRA, teams can gain richer insights into development activity, enhance collaboration, and manage risks more effectively. This holistic approach empowers engineering leaders to make informed decisions and drive continuous improvement in their software development processes. Embracing this integration will ultimately lead to better project outcomes and a more productive engineering culture. As the software development landscape continues to evolve, leveraging the power of both JIRA and Git data will be essential for teams looking to stay competitive and deliver high-quality products efficiently.
Developer productivity is the new buzzword across the industry. Suddenly, measuring developer productivity has started going mainstream after the remote work culture, and companies like McKinsey are publishing articles titled - ”Yes, you can measure software developer productivity” causing a stir in the software development community, So we thought we should share our take on- Developer Productivity.
We will be covering the following Whats, Whys & Hows about Developer Productivity in this piece-
Developer productivity refers to the effectiveness and efficiency with which software developers create high-quality software that meets business goals. It encompasses various dimensions, including code quality, development speed, team collaboration, and adherence to best practices. For engineering managers and leaders, understanding developer productivity is essential for driving continuous improvement and achieving successful project outcomes.
Quality of Output: Developer productivity is not just about the quantity of code or code changes produced; it also involves the quality of that code. High-quality code is maintainable, readable, and free of significant bugs, which ultimately contributes to the overall success of a project.
Development Speed: This aspect measures how quickly developers (usually referred as developer velocity) can deliver features, fixes, and updates. While developer velocity is important, it should not come at the expense of code quality. Effective engineering teams strike a balance between delivering quickly and maintaining high standards.
Collaboration and Team Dynamics: Successful software development relies heavily on effective teamwork. Collaboration tools and practices that foster communication and knowledge sharing can significantly enhance developer productivity. Engineering managers should prioritize creating a collaborative environment that encourages teamwork.
Adherence to Best Practices for Outcomes: Following coding standards, conducting code review, and implementing testing protocols are essential for maintaining development productivity. These practices ensure that developers produce high-quality work consistently, which can lead to improved project outcomes.
Wanna Improve your Dev Productivity?
We all know that no love to be measured but the CEOs & CFOs have an undying love for measuring the ROI of their teams, which we can't ignore. The more the development productivity, the more the RoI. However, measuring developer productivity is essential for engineering managers and leaders too who want to optimize their teams' performance- We can't improve something that we don't measure.
Understanding how effectively developers work can lead to improved project outcomes, better resource allocation, and enhanced team morale. In this section, we will explore the key reasons why measuring developer productivity is crucial for engineering management.
Measuring developer productivity allows engineering managers to identify strengths and weaknesses within their teams. By analyzing developer productivity metrics, leaders can pinpoint areas where new developer excel and where they may need additional support or resources. This insight enables managers to tailor training programs, allocate tasks more effectively, and foster a culture of continuous improvement.
Developer productivity is directly linked to business success. By measuring development team productivity, managers can assess how effectively their teams deliver features, fix bugs, and contribute to overall project goals. Understanding productivity levels helps align development efforts with business objectives, ensuring that the team is focused on delivering value that meets customer needs.
Effective measurement of developer productivity enables better resource allocation. By understanding how much time and effort are required for various tasks, managers can make informed decisions about staffing, project timelines, and budget allocation. This ensures that resources are utilized efficiently, minimizing waste and maximizing output.
Measuring developer productivity can also contribute to a positive work environment. By recognizing high-performing teams and individuals, managers can boost morale and motivation. Additionally, understanding productivity trends can help identify burnout or dissatisfaction, allowing leaders to address issues proactively and create a healthier workplace culture.
In today’s fast-paced software development landscape, data-driven decision-making is essential. Measuring developer productivity provides concrete data that can inform strategic decisions. Whether it's choosing new tools, adopting agile methodologies, or implementing process changes, having reliable developer productivity metrics allows managers to make informed choices that enhance team performance.
Regularly measuring productivity can highlight the importance of collaboration and communication within teams. By assessing metrics related to teamwork, such as code reviews and pair programming sessions, managers can encourage practices that foster collaboration. This not only improves productivity but overall developer experience by strengthening team dynamics and knowledge sharing.
Ultimately, understanding developer experience and measuring developer productivity leads to better outcomes for both the team and the organization as a whole.
Measuring developer productivity is essential for engineering managers and leaders who want to optimize their teams' performance.
Focus on Outcomes, Not Outputs: Shift the emphasis from measuring outputs like lines of code to focusing on outcomes that align with business objectives. This encourages developers to think more strategically about the impact of their work.
Measure at the Team Level: Assess productivity at the team level rather than at the individual level. This fosters team collaboration, knowledge sharing, and a focus on collective goals rather than individual competition.
Incorporate Qualitative Feedback: Balance quantitative metrics with qualitative feedback from developers through surveys, interviews, and regular check-ins. This provides valuable context and helps identify areas for improvement.
Encourage Continuous Improvement: Position productivity measurement as a tool for continuous improvement rather than a means of evaluation. Encourage developers to use metrics to identify areas for growth and work together to optimize workflows and development processes.
Lead by Example: As engineering managers and leaders, model the behavior you want to see in your team & team members. Prioritize work-life balance, encourage risk-taking and innovation, and create an environment where developers feel supported and empowered.
Measuring Dev productivity involves assessing both team and individual contributions to understand how effectively developers are delivering value through their development processes. Here’s how to approach measuring productivity at both levels:
Measuring productivity at the team level provides a more comprehensive view of how collaborative efforts contribute to project success. Here are some effective metrics:
The DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) metrics are widely recognized for evaluating team performance. Key metrics include:
This metric measures the time taken from the start of work on a task to its completion, providing insights into the efficiency of the software development process.
Surveys and feedback mechanisms can gauge team morale and satisfaction, which are critical for long-term productivity.
Assessing the frequency and quality of code reviews, pair programming sessions, and communication can provide insights into how well the software engineering team collaborates.
While team-level metrics are crucial, individual developer productivity also matters, particularly for performance evaluations and personal development. Here are some metrics to consider:
Measuring developer productivity metrics presents unique challenges compared to more straightforward metrics used in sales or hiring. Here are some reasons why:
By employing a balanced approach that considers both quantitative and qualitative factors, with a few developer productivity tools, engineering leaders can gain valuable insights into their teams' productivity and foster an environment of continuous improvement & better developer experience.
Measuring developer productivity is a critical task for engineering managers and leaders, yet it comes with its own set of challenges and potential pitfalls. Understanding these challenges is essential to avoid the dangers of misinterpretation and to ensure that developer productivity metrics genuinely reflect the contributions of developers. In this section, we will explore the challenges of measuring developer productivity and highlight what not to measure.
Measuring developer productivity is fraught with challenges and dangers that engineering managers must navigate carefully. By understanding these complexities and avoiding outdated or superficial metrics, leaders can foster a more accurate and supportive environment for their development team productivity.
Developer productivity improvements are a critical factor in the success of software development projects. As engineering managers or technology leaders, measuring and optimizing developer productivity is essential for driving development team productivity and delivering successful outcomes. However, measuring development productivity can have a significant impact on engineering culture & software engineering talent, which must be carefully navigated. Let's talk about measuring developer productivity while maintaining a healthy and productive engineering culture.
Measuring developer productivity presents unique challenges compared to other fields. The complexity of software development, inadequate traditional metrics, team dynamics, and lack of context can all lead to misguided incentives and decreased morale. It's crucial for engineering managers to understand these challenges to avoid the pitfalls of misinterpretation and ensure that developer productivity metrics genuinely reflect the contributions of developers.
Remember, the goal is not to maximize metrics but to create a development environment where software engineers can thrive and deliver maximum value to the organization.
Development teams using Typo experience a 30% improvement in Developer Productivity. Want to Try Typo?
Wanna Improve your Dev Productivity?
In the latest episode of 'groCTO Originals' podcast (formerly: 'Beyond the Code'), host Kovid Batra engages in a thought-provoking discussion with Jacob Singh, Chief Technology Officer in Residence at Alpha Wave Global. He brings extensive experience from his roles at Blinkit, Acquia, and Sequoia Capital. The heart of their conversation revolves around ‘Enhancing DevEx, Code Review and Leading Gen Z’. https://youtu.be/TFTrSjXI3Tg?si=H_KxnZGlFOsBtw7Y The discussion begins with Jacob's reflection on India and his career break. Moving on to the main section, he explores the evolving definition and widespread adoption of developer experience. He also draws comparisons between tech culture in Indian versus Western companies and addresses strategies for cultivating effective DevEx for Gen Z & younger generations. Furthermore, he shares practical advice for tech leaders to navigate the ‘culture-market fit’ challenge and team structuring ideas from his hands-on experience at Grofers (now ‘Blinkit’). Lastly, Jacob offers parting advice to developers and leaders to embrace AI tools like Copilot and Cursor for maximizing efficiency and productivity, advocating for investing in quality tooling without hesitation.
Kovid Batra: Hi, everyone! This is Kovid, back with another episode of Beyond the Code by Typo. Today with us, we have a special guest. He's currently a CTO in Residence with Alpha Wave Group, which is a VC group. He comes with 20-plus years of engineering and leadership experience. He has worked with multiple startups and orgs like Blinkit as a CTO. He's the guest whom I have met and he's the only guest whom I have met in person, and I really liked talking to him at the SaaSBoomi event. Welcome to the show, Jacob. Great to have you here.Jacob Singh: Thanks. Good to be here, to chat with you.Kovid Batra: Cool. I think, let's start with something very unique that I've seen experienced with you, that is your name. It's Jacob Singh, right? So, how did that fusion happen?Jacob Singh: Just seemed like fun, you know? Just can't, since I was living in India anyway, I figured Smith is harder to pronounce, so.. I'm just kidding. My dad's from here. My dad's Punjabi. So, you know, when a brown boy and a white girl, they love each other a lot, then, you know, you end up with a Jacob Singh. That's about it. There's not much else to it. I grew up in the States, but I've lived in India on and off for the past 20 years.Kovid Batra: Great, great. Perfect. That's rare to see, at least in India. Most of the generation, maybe half-Indian, half-American are in the U.S. But what did you love about India? What made you come here?Jacob Singh: Good question. I was trying to escape my tech stuff. So, I sort of started very early. I taught myself to code as a teenager and started my first business when I was 18 and I'd done pretty well. And then, when I was like 21-22, I just sort of decided I wanted to do something different, do something in the social sector, helping people. So, I took a job with an NGO in West Delhi and sort of shifted for that. That was the original purpose. Why did I stay? I guess there's something dynamic and interesting about the place. India's changed a lot in 20 years, as everybody knows. And, I think that's been continuously exciting to be a part of. It doesn't feel stagnant. It doesn't feel like, I mean, a lot of changes are not in the direction I would love, to be honest, but, you know, but it's an interesting place. There's always something happening. And I found that, and then eventually you build your community, your friends and your family and all that kind of stuff. So, this is home. Yeah, that's about it.Kovid Batra: Perfect. Perfect. Talking about the family, I was just talking to you on LinkedIn. I found that there was like a one-year break that you took in your career and you were just parenting at that time. And honestly, that's very different and very unique to a culture, to an Indian culture, actually. So, I just wanted to know how was your experience there. I'm sure it would have made you learn a lot of things, as it does for a lot of other parents. But I just wanted to hear about your experience with your kid.Jacob Singh: Hopefully, it's not so uncommon. I think it's starting to change especially the role of men as fathers in India. I think it's traditionally, like my dad's father, he just saw him for tea, you know, and he was reading the newspaper and he'd meet him once a year on his birthday and take him to a quality restaurant for a coke, you know, that was their relationship. I think things are different with Indian fathers these days. I think for me, you know, we were just, perfectly honest, was going through a divorce. Difficult. I needed to be there for my daughter and I was, you know, sort of taking half the responsibility in terms of time with her. This was eight years ago. And I think my parents had also divorced. So, I was kind of, my dad was a very active part of my upbringing and did all the things, did all the dishes, cooked all the meals, you know, was around. He was also working as a programmer and did all that, but he was at home as well. And he found ways to make it work, even if it had meant sacrificing his career to some extent. He was working from home when I was a kid in the 80s. So, he had a giant IBM 880, or whatever computer, a little tiny green screen, a 300-bot modem, you know, to connect and send his work up. So, that's how I grew up. Turned out to benefit me a lot, uh, when it came to learning computers, but, um, you know, he would convince him to do that cause he was good at his job, and he's like, I have to be there for my kids. And he made it work, you know? I think we all find those times where we need to lean into family or lean into work in different proportions, you know?Kovid Batra: Hmm. Great. I think amazing job there honestly, Jacob All right, that was great knowing you and thanks for that quick intro. Moving on to the main section of our today's podcast, enhancing the developer experience. So, that's our topic for today. So let's start very basic, very simple. What is developer experience according to you?Jacob Singh: What is developer experience? It's an interesting term. I guess it's, you know, the day-to-day of how a programmer gets their job done. I guess the term would be everything encapsulated from, how their boss talks to them, how they work with their teammates, the kind of tools they use for project management down to the quality of documentation, APIs, the kind of tools they use on their computer, the tools they use in the cloud that they work with, et cetera. And all of that encapsulated is how effective can they be at their job, you know, and the environment around them that allows them to be effective. I guess what I would define it as.Kovid Batra: And why do you think it's trending so much these days? I think what you mentioned and what I have also read everywhere about developer experience is the same fundamental that has been existing all the years, right? But why is it trending these days? Why do you think this is something up in the market?Jacob Singh: Good question. I guess, I mean, I've been around for a while, so I think in the earlier days of the industry, when I first started engineers were a little expensive, but they were also looked at as like a commodity that you could just use. Like, you put them on a spreadsheet, you pay the engineers, you get the work done. They weren't considered really central. They were considered sort of like factory workers in an expensive factory, to some extent. I think it was more so in the 80s and 90s, right? But like, it's still trending more and more in the direction of engineers kind of being very expensive and being decision-makers, moving into C-level positions, having more authority, seeing that, like, if you just look at, you know, the S&P 500, you look at the, you look at the stock market and you see that the top companies are all tech companies and they command most of the market cap. I think those days are over. So now, it's very much that if you're able to execute with your engineering roadmap, you're able to win the market. It's considered the basis of a lot of companies, sort of strategies, whether they're a tech company or not, and therefore the effectiveness of the developers and the team plays into which developers will join you. And when they join you, how likely are they to be engaged and to be retained? And then, how effective, you know, is each developer because they're a rare commodity because it's hard to find good developers. There's so much demand, et cetera, even in recessionary times, most of the layoffs are not engineering teams. And so, the effectiveness of each engineer and their ability to motivate and retain them becomes paramount to a company strategy.Kovid Batra: Right. Makes sense. So, according to you, I'm sure you have had the experience of seeing this shift in the West as well as in companies in India, right? When you see the culture, particularly talking about the tech culture in a company, like maybe, for example, you work with a company like Blinkit, which is huge today in India and you must have worked with other companies in the West. How would you compare, like, how are teams being led in these two different cultures? Jacob Singh: Well, I would say those kind of, you know, anything I say is going to be a gross generalization, and it's going to be incorrect more often than it's correct. I think there's more difference between two Indian companies than there is between any given American or any Indian company, you know. There's a lot of variation. But if I'm being put on the spot to make such generalizations, I would say that one big difference is the age and maturity of engineers. So, like, when I was 29, I got hired as an IC, a Principal Engineer at this company called Acquia. They kind of acquired my startup and I joined there, and, you know, we had PhDs on the team who were ICs, right? Our VP Engineering, you know, had 25 years of experience in the field and was, you know, sort of. You know, one of my colleagues was like heading R&D for the RFID team at Sun. You know, like the very senior guys were still writing code.Kovid Batra: Yeah.Jacob Singh: It's like, very much just like in the weeds writing code. They're not trying to be managers and an architect. They're just like a programmer, right? I got my first team, like to manage, like I got a small team like at 25-26, but really I got my first team of like really qualified, expensive engineers when I was like 32. Whereas here, I'm a VP Engineering at Grofers at like 29. It's like managing a 100 people. It's very common to be much early in your career. Engineers with 3-4 years of experience are sort of talking about, "I should be an SDE-IV". So, the whole like, that scale is different. You have a much younger audience. In the States, at least when I was coming up, there's a lot more earning your stripes over a long time before you go into management. Whereas here, we have a lot more very junior managers. I think that's a big difference.Kovid Batra: Okay. And that's interesting, actually.Jacob Singh: That creates a lot of other dynamics, right? I mean, you just have like, generally you know, you have more, I would, and I hate to say this, probably going to take shit for this, but having been an engineering leader in both places, I feel like you have more like discipline and like professionalism issues here, generally, which is not to do with Indians. It's just to do with the age of people. Like, they're 24 years old, they're not gonna be very professional, right? Like a lot of your team.Kovid Batra: No, totally. I think, we are not generalizing this, but as you said, it's probably about the age. In one of my podcasts, I was just talking to this fellow from Spain. He's leading a team of almost 30 folks now.Jacob Singh: Yeah.Kovid Batra: And 50% of them were early hires, like early 20 hires, right?Jacob Singh: Yeah.Kovid Batra: And he's that guy. And then I was talking to somebody in India who was leading a 50-member team there. Again, 50% of the folks were like junior engineers in their 25-26. And both of them had the same issue of handling Gen Zs. So, I think from where you are coming, it's totally relatable and I think we touched on a very good topic here. How to create a good developer experience for these early-age, 25-26-year-olds in the system? Because they're not stable, they are not, So again, I am also not generalizing. A lot of good folks are there, but they're not like in the right mindset of sticking to a place, learning gradually and then making that impact. They just like really want to hop on fast on everything.Jacob Singh: Yeah.Kovid Batra: So, how do you handle that? Because that definitely is a pain for a lot of us, not just in India, but across the globe.Jacob Singh: No, no, I've heard this a lot, you know, and I'm not really sure. I mean, I'm far from Gen Z. I was actually having this exact same conversation with the CTO of an Indian unicorn, a pretty large one, who was talking about the same thing. He's like, "How do I motivate these?" This seems like the younger guys, they don't really want to work and they're constantly, you know, making noise and they think it's their right to work from home. They think it's their right to work 20-30 hours a week. They don't want, they don't want to advance and follow all this sort of stuff. I guess my advice to him was maybe a bit generic and maybe incorrect. You know, I think there are differences in generations, but I think some truths are fairly universal and I've uncovered a couple of things which have worked for me. And every manager has their own style and because of that, and every company has its own culture and its own goals. And so, there's a thing that's 'culture-market fit'. So, certain leaders will do well in certain kinds of companies, right, who have certain kinds of cultures made for the market they're in. This is not generic advice for everybody. But for me, I like to work in startups and I like to work in you know, startups, which are working on, I would say, kind of top-line problems which means not efficiency-related problems so much as innovation-related problems. How do we discover the next big thing? What feature is going to work with customers? Et cetera. And in such places, you need people who are motivated by intrinsic, they need intrinsic creative motivation. Carrot and Stick stuff doesn't work. Carrot and Stick will work for a customer service team, for a sales team, it'll work for an IT team at a Fortune 500 who's shipping the same things over and over again, but for creative teams, they really need to care about it intrinsically. They need to be interested in the puzzle. They want to solve the puzzle. You can't sort of motivate them in other ways. And I think this applies to the younger generation as much as the older ones. You know, the best thing to do is to, basically, it's a very simple formula, it sounds cliché but figure out where the hell you're going, why you should go there and everyone in the team should know where you're going and they should know why they're important to that strategy, what they're doing that's important, you know, and they should believe it themselves that it can work. And then, they should believe that if it works, you're gonna take care of them. And if you solve those things, they will work hard and they will try to solve problems. A lot of companies think they can shortchange that by having a crappy strategy, by having, you know, a lot of program management, which removes people from the real problem they're solving by treating people as numbers on a spreadsheet, naturally, you're going to get, you know, poor results when you do that.Kovid Batra: Totally. I think very well answered, Jacob. I think finding that culture-market fit and finding the place where you will also fit in naturally, you would be easily able to align with the folks who are working there and maybe lead them better. I think that that analogy is really, really good here. Apart from that, do you think like not everyone gets that opportunity to find the right place for themselves, right, when there is a dearth of opportunities in the market? What would be the advice for the leaders that they should apply to them when they are not in the culture-market fit scenario?Jacob Singh: Leaders? You mean, if a leader is in an organization where they don't feel like the values of the tech team aligned to their value, whether it be engineer or CTO or something?Kovid Batra: Correct, yes.Jacob Singh: Good question. The best thing to do is probably to quit. But if you can't afford, I mean, I say that a bit flippantly. I'm not saying "quit early". I'm not saying "don't try". I mean, if you really have a true values alignment problem you know, then that's hard to get over. If it's tactical, if it's relationship-based, you can work on those things, right? If you feel like you have to be someone you don't like to fit in an organization, then that's unlikely to change if it comes from the top, right? There's a very cliché saying, but you know, "Be careful who you work with. You're more likely to become them than they are to become you." And so, I would say that. But to get more practical, let's say if you can't, or you're feeling challenged, et cetera. Your question was basically, okay, so let's say you're a VP Engineering or Director of Engineering and you're unhappy with the leadership in some way, right?Kovid Batra: Yeah. So, no, I think it makes sense. The advice is generic, but it definitely gives you the direction of where you should be thinking when you are stuck in such a situation. You can't really fight against it.Jacob Singh: Yeah. I will say a couple of things. This is also the same conversation I had mentioned earlier. This also came up with the typical thing of leadership not trusting tech. You know, they don't think we're doing anything. They think we're moving too slow. They think we're, you know, sandbagging everything, etc. And to solve that, I think, which is not a values problem. That's the case in almost every organization. I mean, there's never been a CEO who said, "Oh, man! The tech team is so fast. They just keep.. I can't come up with dumb ideas fast enough. They keep implementing everything." So, you know, it's never happened in the history of companies. So, there's always that conflict which is natural and healthy. But I think to get over that, that's basically a transparency problem, usually. It's like, are you clear on your sprint reviews? Do you do them in public? Do you share a lot of information around the progress made? Do you share it in a way that gets consumed or not? Are you A/B testing stuff? Are you able to look at numbers? Able to talk numbers with your business teams? Do you know the impact of features you're releasing? Can you measure it? Right? If you can measure it, release that information. If you can give timely updates in a way which is entertaining and appropriate for the audience that they actually listen those problems tend to go away. Then it's just, the main problem there is not that people don't trust you. It's just that you're a black box to them. They don't understand your language. And so, you have to find, you know, techniques to go over that. Yeah.Kovid Batra: Yeah. Makes sense. Great, great. All right, coming back to enhancing the developer experience there. So, there are multiple areas where you can see developer experience taking a hit or working well, right? So, which are those areas which you feel are getting impacted with this enhancement of developer experience and how you have worked upon those in any one of your experiences in the past with any of the companies?Jacob Singh: You said "enhancement of developer experience". What do you mean by that?Kovid Batra: So, yeah. I'll repeat my question. Maybe I confused you with too many words there. So, in your previous experiences, you must have worked with many teams and there would have been various areas that could have impacted the developer experience. So, just to give you a very simple example, as you talked about the tooling, the people whom they're working with. So, there could be multiple issues that impact the developer experience, right? So, in your previous experiences where you found out a specific developer experience related problem and how you solved it, how it was impacting the overall delivery of the development team. Just want to like deep dive into that experience of yours.Jacob Singh: Yeah. So I think a big one was I can talk about Grofers. So, one of the things we had when I first came to Grofers, we had about 50-60 people in tech, product engineering, data, design, etc. We had them into different pods. That was good. Someone had created like different teams for different parts of the application. So, it wasn't just a free-flowing pool of labor. There was the, you know, the shopping cart team and the browsing team and the supply chain, like the warehouse management team, the last mile team, it was like, you know, four or five teams. But there was a shared mobile team. So at the front end, there was, there was one Android team, there was one iOS team, there was one web team, which again, is very common, not necessarily a bad idea. But what ended up happening was that the business teams would, they wouldn't trust the tech deadlines because a lot of times what happened is there'd be a bunch of backend engineers in the shopping cart team, they'd finish something, and then they'd be stuck on the front end team because the front end team was working on something for the, or the Android team was working on something for the browsing team, right? The iOS team was free, so they would build that shopping cart feature. But they couldn't really release it yet because the releases had to go out together with Android and iOS, because, you know, the backend release had to go with that. So, we're waiting on this one. Then we're waiting on the web one. There's this cascading waiting that's happening. And now, the shopping cart team is like, "We're done with our part. We're waiting on Android. So we're going to start a new feature." They start a new feature. And then again, the problem starts again where that feature is then waiting on somebody else, waiting on the QA team or waiting on somebody else. So, all of these waiting aspects that happen ruin the developer experience because the developer can't finish something. They get something half done, but it's not out in production, so they can't forget about it. Production is a moving target. The more teams you have, the more frequently it's changing. So, you have to go back and revisit that code. It's stale now. You've forgotten it, right? And you haven't actually released anything to customers. So, the business teams are like, "What the hell? You said you're done. You said you'd be done two weeks ago." And you're like, "Oh, I'm waiting for this team." "Stop giving me excuses." Right?Kovid Batra: Right.Jacob Singh: That team's waiting on the other team. So, I think one of the big things we did was we said, we took a hard call and said, at the time, Grofers was not quick commerce. At that time, Grofers was like DMart online, cheap discounting, 2-3 day delivery, and we scaled up massively on that proposition. And, uh, we said, hey, people who care about the price of bread being 5% less or more, do they own iPhones? No, they do not own iPhones. That's like 5% of our population. So we just ditched the iPhone team, cross-trained people on Android. We took all the Android engineers and we put them into the individual teams. We also took QA, automated most of our tests, and put QA resources into each of the teams, SDATs, and kind of removed those horizontal shared services teams and put them in fully cross-functional teams. And that improved developer experience a lot. And it's kind of obvious, like people talk about cross-functional teams and being able to get everything done within a team, being more efficient, less waiting for the teams, but it has another huge benefit. And the other huge benefit is motivation-wise. You cannot expect, like I said earlier, you want your engineers to care about the business outcomes. You want them to understand the strategy. They don't understand why they're building it. But if an engineer has to build something, send it to another team, get that team to send it to some other team, get that team to send it to some other team, to a release team to get released eventually, right? And then, the results come back three months later. You can't expect that engineer to be excited about their metrics, their business metrics and the outcomes.Kovid Batra: Right.Jacob Singh: If you put everyone in one team, they operate like a small startup and they just continually crank that wheel and put out new things, continually get feedback and learn, and they improve their part of the business and it's much more motivating and they're much more creative as a result. And I think that changes the whole experience for a developer. Just reduces those loops, those learning loops. You get a sense of progress and a sense of productivity. And that's really the most motivating thing.Kovid Batra: Totally makes sense. And it's a very good example. I think this is how you should reshape teams from time to time based on the business requirements and the business scale is what's going to impact the developer experience here. But what I'm thinking here is that this would have become a very evident problem while executing, right? Your project is not getting shipped and the business teams are probably out there standing, waiting for the release to happen. And you started feeling that pain and why it is happening and you went on solving it. But there could be multiple other issues when you scale up and 50-60 is a very good number actually. But when you go beyond that, there are small teams releasing something or the other on an everyday basis. How exactly would you go about measuring the developer experience on different areas? So, of course, this was one. Like, your sprints were delayed or your deliverables were delayed. This was evident. But how do you go about finding, in general, what's going on and how developers are feeling?Jacob Singh: Well, we hit those scaling things and like you said, yes, people are delayed. It sounds obvious, but it's mostly not. Most leaders actually take exactly the opposite approach. They say, "Okay. No more excuses. We're going to plan everything out at the beginning of the quarter. We're going to.. You plan your project. We'll do all the downstream mapping with every other Android, iOS, QA team required. We'll allocate all their bandwidth ahead of time. So, we'll never have this problem again. And we'll put program managers in place to make sure the whole thing happens." They go the opposite direction, which I think is kind of, well, it never works, to be honest. Kovid Batra: Yeah, of course.Jacob Singh: In terms of measuring developer experience as you scale. So, we got up to like 220 people in tech I think at some point in Grofers and we scaled up very quickly. That was within a year and a half or something, that happened. And, you know, that became much more challenging. I honestly don't love the word 'developer experience' cause it doesn't mean anything specifically cause there's sort of your experience as an employee, right, HR kind of related stuff, your manager or whatever, there's your experience, you know, as an engineer, like the tools you're using and stuff like that, right? And then your experience, like, as a team member, like your colleagues, your manager, your kind of stuff like that, right? So it's slightly different from an employee in terms of, it's not about company confidence and stuff or strategy, but more about your relationships. So, there's different areas of it. For measuring, like, general satisfaction, we use things like Officevibe, we use things like continuous performance improvement tools, like 15Five. we brought in OKRs, a lot of things which kind of are there to connect people to strategy and regularly check in and make sure that we're not missing things. All of those were effective in pockets, depending on usage. But by far the most effective thing, and I know this might not be the popular answer when it comes to what type of sells, although I do like the product a lot, which is why I'm doing this. I think it's a cool product. A lot of it is really just like 1-on-1s, just making sure that every manager does a 1-on-1 every two weeks. And making it like, put it in some kind of spreadsheet, some kind of lightweight thing, but making sure that new managers learn they have to do it, how to do them well, how to, you know, connect with individuals, understand their motivations and like follow through on stuff and make small improvements in their lives. Like, that's the cheat code. It's just doing the hard work of being a manager, following through with people, listening to them. That being said, data helps. So, like, what you guys have what you guys built, I've built small versions of that. I wrote a script which would look at all the repositories, see how long things are sitting in PR, look at Jira, see how long things are sitting in wait. You know, build continuous flow sort of diagrams, you know, sort of just showing people where your value, team is getting stuck. I've, like hand-coded some of that stuff and it's been helpful to start conversations. It's been helpful to convince people they need to change their ideas about what's happening. I think those are some of the ideas.Kovid Batra: Thanks for promoting Typo there. But yeah, I think that also makes sense. It's not necessary that you have to have a tooling in place, but in general, keeping a tab on these metrics or the understanding of how things are flowing in the team is critical and probably that's from where you understand where the developer experience and the experience of the team members would be impacted. One thing you mentioned was that you scaled very rapidly at Grofers and it was from 50 to 250, right? One interesting piece, I think we were having this discussion at the time of SaaSBoomi also the code review experience, right? Because at that scale, it becomes really difficult to, like even for a Director of Engineering to go into the code and see how it is flowing, where things are getting stuck. So, this code review experience in itself, I'm sure this impacts a lot of the developer experience piece, so to say. So, how did you manage that and how it flowed there for you?Jacob Singh: Well, one is I didn't manage it directly. So, like Grofers is big enough that I had a Director of Engineering sort of, or VP Engineering for different-different divisions. And that level of being hands-on in terms of code reviews, I wouldn't really participate in other than like, you know, sometimes as an observer, sometimes to show proof, if we're doing something new, like we're doing automation, I might whip up some sample code, show people, do a review here and there for a specific purpose about something, but never like generally manage those, like, look at that. Grofers was really good this way. I think we had a really good academic culture where people did like public code reviews. There wasn't this like protection shame kind of thing. It was very open. We had a big open-source culture. We used to host lots of open-source meetups. There was a lot of positive sort of view of inquiry and learning. It wasn't looked at as a threatening thing, which in a lot of organizations is looked at as a threatening kind of thing. And the gatekeeping thing, which I think we try to discourage. I think we had a lot of really positive aspects of that. Vedic Kapoor was heading DevOps and Security infrastructure stuff that I work with a lot. He's consulting now, doing this kind of work. He did a lot of great, sort of workshops and a lot of like a continuous improvement program with his teams around this kind of stuff where they do public reviews every so often every week or whatever. The DevOps teams made a big point of being that service team for the engineer so they would kind of build features for engineers. So, we had a developer experience team, essentially, because we were that size. Well, the review process, generally, I mean, I gave this rant at SaaSBoomi, and I think I've given it often. I think PRs are one of the worst things that's happened to software engineering, in the last 20 years.Kovid Batra: Yeah, you mentioned that.Jacob Singh: Yeah, and I think it's a real problem. And it's this funny thing where everyone assumes that progress moves forward and it never goes backwards. And then they, the younger generation doesn't necessarily believe that it could have been better before. But I'll tell you the reason why I say that is that, you know, Git was created by Linus, by the creator of Linux because they needed, well, they needed something immediately, but also they needed something which would allow thousands and thousands of people working at different companies with different motivations to all collaborate on the same project. And so, it's the branching and the sub branching and the sub-sub branching which Git allowed people to simultaneously work on many different branches and then sort of merge them late and review them in any order they wanted to and discuss them at length to get them in and had to be very secure and very stable at the end of the day. And that made a lot of sense, right? It's very asynchronous and things take a very long time to finish. That's not how your software team works. You guys are all sitting on the same table. What are you doing? Like, you don't need to do that. You can just be like, "Hey, look at this, right? There's a different way to do it." Even if you're on a remote team, you can be like, "Let's do a screen share." Or, "Can I meet you tomorrow at two or whatever, and we'll go through this." Or like, "I had some ideas, paste it in Slack, get back to me when you can." You know, "Here's my patch." Whatever. And I think what ends up happening is that this whole, the GitHub, and for open-source projects, it's huge. Git is amazing. Pull requests are amazing. They've enabled a lot. But if you are a team where you all kind of work on the same codebase, you all kind of work closely together, there's no reason to send up this long asynchronous process where it can take anywhere between a couple of hours to, I've seen a couple weeks to get a review done. And it creates a log jam and that slows down teams and that reduces again, that loop. I'm big on loops. Like, I think you should be able to run your code in less than a second. You should be able to compile as quickly as possible. You should be able to test things as quickly as possible that you should be able to get things to the market and review them as quickly as possible. You should get feedback from your colleague as soon as possible. And like, I think a lot of that has gotten worse. So, engineers like learn slower and they're waiting more, they're waiting for PRs to get reviewed, there's politics around it. And so, I think that that process, probably should change. More frequent reviews, pairing you know, sort of less formal reviews, et cetera. Yeah, and TDD if you can do it. It's kind of the way to get much faster loops, productivity loops going, get things out sooner. Sorry, a bit of a long rant, but yeah, PRs suck.Kovid Batra: No, I think this is really interesting, how we moved from enhancing developer experience and how code review should be done better because that ultimately impacts the overall experience and that's what most of the developers are doing most of the time. So, I think that makes sense. And it was.. Yeah?Jacob Singh: I just want to caveat that before you misquote me. I'm not saying formal reviews are bad. You should also have a formal review, but it should be like, it should be a formality. Like, you should have already done so many reviews informally along the way that anyone is reviewing it already kind of knows it's there and then the formal review happens. And it's like in the books and we've looked at it and we put the comments. It shouldn't just be like, "Here's a 20K patch.", a day before the deadline. You know what I mean? That shouldn't happen anymore, I think that's what I'm trying to say.Kovid Batra: Yeah. No, no, totally makes sense. I think this last piece was very interesting. And, we can have a complete discussion, a podcast totally on this piece itself. So, I'll stop here. And thank you so much for your time today, for discussing all these aspects of developer experience and how code reviews should be done better. Any parting advice, Jacob, for the dev teams of the modern age?Jacob Singh: The dev teams or the other managers? I guess the managers are probably watching this more than developers.Kovid Batra: Whichever you like.Jacob Singh: A parting advice. I would say that we're at the most exciting time to be an engineer since I mean, maybe I'm biased, but since I started coding. When I started coding, it was like, just as the web was taking off. You know, like, I remember when, like, CSS was released, you know, that's old. So I was like, "Oh, shit, this is great. This is so much fun!" You know, like, when it started getting adopted, right? So I think, like the sort of dynamic programmable web was nice when I started, right? Now, we're at the second most exciting one, in my opinion, as an engineer. And I think it's surprising to me. I work with a lot of portfolio companies at Alpha Wave. I talk to new companies that I'm looking at investing in. It's really surprising to me how few of them use Copilot or Cursor or these various sorts of AI tools to assist in development or like everyone uses them a little bit, but not programmatically. They don't really look into it too much. And I think that's a missed opportunity. I still code. When I code, I use them extensively. Like, extensively. I'm on ChatGPT. I'm on Copilot. I pay for all these subscriptions. You know, I use ShellGPT. I don't remember shell commands anymore. ShellGPT, by the way, is great to plug. Write what you want to do, hit ctrl+L, and it'll like generate the shell command for you. Even stuff I know how to do, it's faster. But the main thing is, like, the yak shaving goes away. So, I don't know if you guys know yak shaving, but yak shaving is this idea of having to do all this configuration, all this setup, all this screw around to get the thing actually working before you can start coding. Like, learning some new framework or dependency management, bullshit like that. That stuff is so much better now. You take your errors. You paste them into ChatGPT. It explains it. It's right most of the time. You can ask it to build a config script. So, I think if you know how to use the tool, you can just be a million times more productive. So, I would say lean into it. Don't be intimidated by it. Definitely don't shortchange it. Dedicate some research effort. Trust your engineers. Buy those subscriptions, It's 20 bucks a month. Don't be so cheap, please. Indian engineering managers are really cheap with tooling, I think a lot of time. Just spend it. It's fine. It's going to be worth it. I think that would be my big thing right now.Kovid Batra: Great, Jacob. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for this. We'd love to have another discussion with you on any of the topics you love in the coming shows. And for today, I think, thanks a lot once again.Jacob Singh: My pleasure. Same here. Good talking to you, Kovid. All right. See you.Kovid Batra: Thank you. All right, take care. Bye-bye.Jacob Singh: Happy hacking!
In the latest episode of 'groCTO Originals' podcast (formerly: 'Beyond the Code'), host Kovid Batra engages in a thought-provoking discussion with Roman Kuba, VP of Engineering at a tech-based startup Tset. He brings a wealth of experience from his leadership roles at renowned organizations including GitLab, Cloudbees, and CodeSandbox. The heart of their conversation revolves around ‘Scaling startups with a people-first approach’. https://youtu.be/lTtwQ6PPyq8?si=lnOtCuVxjtvu9Ui2 The episode begins with Roman discussing the key events that shaped his life, followed by his responsibilities at Tset. He then details strategies for aligning the team with high-level goals, fostering a collaborative effort rather than a top-down directive. He also addresses challenges encountered during the zero-to-one phase and effective ways to overcome them. Lastly, Roman leaves the audience with essential advice to prioritise user value creation and genuinely care for your team’s ambitions and well-being.
Kovid Batra: Hi, everyone. This is Kovid, back with another episode of Beyond the Code by Typo. Today with us, we have an amazing guest who has 12-plus years of engineering and leadership experience. He's currently serving as a VP of Engineering at a tech-based startup called Tset. He has worked with prestigious names like GitLab as an engineering leader, manager in the past. He's a strong believer of giving back to the community. Great to have you on the show, Roman. Welcome to the show.Roman Kuba: Hi, Kovid. Thank you for having me.Kovid Batra: Great, Roman.Roman Kuba: And by the way, a small thing to correct, the company is called (pronounced) 'Set'.Kovid Batra: Yeah.Roman Kuba: I know a lot of people call it 'T-Set', but it's called 'Set'.Kovid Batra: Oh, I'm so sorry for that. Roman Kuba: All good, all good.Kovid Batra: I'll call it 'Set' from now. Is that cool?Roman Kuba: That sounds good. Yes, sure.Kovid Batra: So, we have VP of Engineering, Tset, on the show today. Before we get started, Roman, I would love to know a little bit about you. And let's just start with a life-defining moment for you in your life that has been really impactful in terms of making Roman who he is today.Roman Kuba: Life-defining moments. Well, there's definitely not too many of them or so, but like, I would say one, thinking back, like very far in the, in the past or so when I was like actually six years old, like, that's like crazy long time, right? But I had like a great opportunity or so with my parents back then. Like my, my dad was like still a student or so and this kind of thing. And we, we didn't have like a lot of money or so, but they saved a lot of money for a long time. And we would like to spend like, I think over half a year basically in Australia. So, I'm currently in Austria, right, or so, and Australia was like a lifelong dream for my parents to get there. And that was one of the things or so.Kovid Batra: I'll just stop you here. Just for our audience, Austria and Australia are two different countries, guys.Roman Kuba: Yes, no kangaroos.Kovid Batra: Yeah. So, you were in Australia.Roman Kuba: Yeah, there was like this thing where, interestingly, to this day, I have like still a lot of memories, even it goes back for a long time, right? And on the one side, it kind of like, changed a lot in like how I started looking at the world and various things, right? And like, having this like constant interest to say like, cool, there's so many cool places to see, so many different kinds of cultures to discover, right? And I think this is one of the things that kind of like changed a lot in how I look at certain things, how I look at like certain stuff that's happening in my own country and these kinds of stuff, right? And I always try to keep a very open mind. And I think having this experience as a young kid or so, it really changed how I look at new things. And my early career is like continuing to just like part of like, traveling to other countries, traveling, like using job opportunities in the way of like seeing more parts of the world was a big, big driving factor for me to be able like to find a job that allows us to do this. And yeah, I think by now I've had the opportunity to work with like so many international people. And I think, really looking back or so, I think that was for me, the one thing was, okay, cool, there's so much more out there than this little Austria. Austria is a very, very small country. And it kind of like shaped my interest for just the general world more than anything else, I think could have done in this age.Kovid Batra: Yeah. I think even I relate to that sentiment and the curiosity, this enthusiasm that it always brings is amazing to have. And like it impacts in so many ways that even today, I sometimes think that like when we are talking to people, the openness that we get, all these things are driven from all these aspects of meeting different people, being into different cultures. So I really relate to it and it's really interesting. Thank you. Thank you, Roman, for this quick brief about yourself. Moving on, you are holding this role of VP Engineering at Tset. I hope this time it's right, right?Roman Kuba: Yeah.Kovid Batra: So, what's your daily routine like? What do you do at Tset? What are your major responsibilities that are coming with this role?Roman Kuba: So I was like trying to describe the VP of Engineering is like, even if it's like in a, more in this leading kind of role, right? For me, one important part of the whole thing is like, every day, my main focus is, okay, what can I improve in our organization today? How can I make like the life of each of our engineers, like better in the way that how to do their day-to-day job, right? And I think like, just kind of like supporting thought is the main thing that kind of drives a lot of the actions I'm doing. So, the current company I'm at, I joined only like last June, right? So, it's like not that long ago, actually. And for me, one of the first things when I kind of started, I saw okay, there's a lot of really, a lot of kind of grown processes that the company fell into, right? And there's a lot of these processes that just like start to kind of grow and grow and grow. I've been out there. We're not like in a way that they were helping the engineers on a daily basis, but often people would think of them like, oh, there's like, I cannot do this faster because there's this overhead and this kind of stuff, right? And the other thing I uncovered with this is like, we also have a lot of implicit knowledge, like just in people's heads. And there's like no shared understanding of certain things. Why do we want certain things to be done in a certain way? How do we handle certain situations? What if we do a certain failure, right? And how to recover from these kinds of things? And we had like a very outdated knowledge base at this point where say, if I ask somebody or say, "Hey, by the way, how can I learn about this?" They would kind of first go through their Slack history and see where they posted a link to a certain page, cause they couldn't find it from just like searching or anything. And so, they always say, "Oh yeah, I have this information somewhere." And that was one of the things that started very early on, okay, how can I make life for everybody in engineering better basically, right? And that is like the main driver. They say like, "Okay, I focus a lot on knowledge base and these kinds of things." And yes, the knowledge base part was for me the critical one in saying like, okay, how can I make information discoverable by everybody? But also, how can I make information like contributable by everybody in a very, very small barrier of entry, right? And basically, all of this for me is also like a big part of what does it mean to lead an entire team, right? It shouldn't be like I constantly tell everybody what to do, but ideally, I want to give people context. I want people like, to know how I make certain decisions or which piece of information do I have that they might not have, right? But just opening this up, making it discoverable, make it useful for everybody, that's my day-to-day. And to this or so we're of course, having now challenges, like we need to scale the team when we need to grow and these kinds of things. And to even be able to do this, like you just need to have a very solid foundation as a company, to have like everybody, like, okay, this is how we operate, this is how we work, this is how you can join the team, so we don't lose on the one side, a lot of knowledge if somebody leaves, but also don't have to spend a ton of time in giving somebody who joins the company all this implicit knowledge, right? Ideally, they say, "Hey, go in there, you know, everything where we are, and then you can join the journey from day one, basically." And that's my focus & help, right?Kovid Batra: That's the interesting as well as one of the hardest parts of bringing to a company. It is when we are talking and when we think about things from a high-level perspective, as a leader, I'm sure this seems to be one of the most critical things to have if you want to scale. But the problem here that I've seen with most of the teams is, like the junior folks who are working, they don't intuitively align towards this. And they find it hard to contribute there. As a leader, you know it's important. So you can dedicate that time, that focus and bring in that goal for the team. Did you do anything specific to trigger that counterintuitive behavior for people to actually go and contribute back or help you make this a crowdsource thing rather than just one person doing it? Because it's an incremental process and it has to come from every angle, right? So, were you able to discover anything interesting there and implement it for the team?Roman Kuba: I, at the start, I necked everybody just like, "Where's this documented?" Right. And if I asked the question and somebody would tell me, "Oh, it's like about this or so." Then, I would kind of immediately say, "Hey, please document it." Right. And once it was written down, I then continued to share it further in the team. So, I kind of said that the work people create and how to write things down, I try to leverage it right away, right, so that the person writing it down also sees the value in it right away.Kovid Batra: That's a really good idea, actually. Roman Kuba: Yeah, for me, that is the number one thing or so. And I really hate these weird icons that pop up in a Mac camera recently or so. It's funny. So, please don't get distracted by them.Kovid Batra: Cool, cool.Roman Kuba: But I think this is so critical, right? If you try to make changes, for you as a manager, as a leader, you're more used to just having like a longer feedback cycle in general. I make a change and they're going to see the success or the impact of a change after a certain amount of time. But as soon as you start involving other people, I think it's critical that they get like very instant gratification of how their work contributes to the overarching goal, right? And by kind of leveraging what they do and saying, "Hey, look, this is what you contributed and it already creates value from the first day you did it." I think this is incredibly important for people to actually don't lose track of the change you want to make overall, right? But to say, "Cool, I'm now part of this journey." Right, and then they go in and now they ping other people. So I'm like, "Hey, have you documented this somewhere?" And it started to be a joke at the start where I say, "Oh, please, please, please document it." By now, but people like constantly ask her, "Where's this documented?" So, you know, it's become like a viral way of like how we write things down. And that was pretty cool.Kovid Batra: No, I think that that's a pretty good idea, actually. We just have to like go to the very basics of how we can really incentivize and reward people for doing this activity. And it makes a lot of sense. Cool, Roman. I think this was something about when you were scaling, really scaling the startup, right? But when it comes to the journey of zero to one, like, you have been at Codeship, right? This was a startup where you were part of the zero-to-one journey. I think those are the one of the most challenging times. Of course, scaling is a problem, I don't deny that, but in zero to one, you're fighting for survival, right? So, in that journey, as an engineering leader, I'm sure you must have tackled a lot of problems. But tell us about one initiative or one challenge that you think was really a challenge for you. And how did you handle it? And what did you learn from that?Roman Kuba: Yeah. So, like for everybody listening, like Codeship, that was my first really, I would say tech startup challenge in this case or so. I joined the company in 2014. Yes, that's a long time ago, actually, yeah. And we were like a CI/CD startup, right? So that means when, basically, this constant delivery and testing of software was pretty like, I don't want to say a super-new thing, but having like a SaaS product doing this, it was a thing that was slowly kind of getting more and more adoption in the market and people getting used to it. I joined that company actually as one of their very early members, as an engineer, I was like still really a front end developer or full stack developer back then, even like, and focused a lot on the front end part. For me, like the, cause you say, what is the challenge? Like there were a ton of challenges on a daily basis back then. Like, everything there, I had to learn a ton of stuff, like, how do startups work, how to make really, basically, build a SaaS product, right, that you have like a ton of other developers rely on now on a daily basis to say like, "Okay, how can we ship things without breaking it? How do we recover from mistakes?" And these kinds of things, right? That was amazing. And I would say, if I think about one specific thing that the biggest one is been there for some time and like we started to introduce a lot of like different kinds of JavaScript stuff, of course, like to make, drive a lot of the very interactive parts of the application, like think of a log output, right? If you know, run something on your terminal, of course, your terminal prints all this stuff. If you do it in the web, right, then you suddenly, basically, need to take all this kind of terminal content and present it to the user in pretty much real time in the web interface, right? And that was at a time where say, jQuery was like still very, very active. And Angular was one of the bigger frameworks and it was Angular 1. And React was like just coming, was slowly the thing kind of driving in, right? And we had this one page of a new part of our product where you could run like a lot of like really complex bills and you would get like a ton of terminal output. I think you would talk about like basically, on the screen, like about, 50-60K DOM nodes that you need to render in basically, like real time for them constantly, right? And it's expanding and this kind of stuff. And there was this one big challenge where I say, okay, we had big customers and they had very big logs and that page was just like crashing the browsers for users. So, we're not able like to look at their log output because it was just like too many DOM nodes to properly handle this refresh and this kind of thing in the way we did it back then. And from the engineering side or so, the interesting part was I really needed to spend a lot of time in dissecting the problem, where was like the big bottleneck, right? We looked at a ton of different kinds of metrics on the time to paint and the refresh on kind of when do we touch which kinds of things. And we had Angular back then as the main driving part for this front end page. And within basically, a week, I did two POCs. One was with React and the other one was with Vue back then. And Vue was like completely unknown. It was like this little fun side project from one person, right? Nobody has heard of it. It was like zero point something. And I had basically, neither knowledge, nor in react, nor in Vue, right? And for me, it was like my main go-to was okay, looking at a piece of documentation, say, "What can I learn about this piece of tech to solve my problem?" cause I identified that rendering is the biggest part in the refreshing and Angular was just really notoriously bad at refreshing a lot of nodes. And like I know back then, so it was React with a constant like, I would say roadblocks we hit back then, cause it was like much more complicated. And the big roadblocks were on a lot on the technical side of things cause we also had to take into account what is the knowledge we currently have within our team, right? It's not good or so if like I build something that only I understand and nobody else in the company can easily contribute to, right? So, taking these constraints into account is incredibly important, especially in the early parts of the journey of a startup. You need to take all the resources you have in a smart way. And with Vue, I was able, like to build this page in such an easy way that even a backend developer could look at the code, understand how it works, understand how to contribute to it or so in a very easy way, and it didn't need to jump through a ton of like building hoops and kind of steps to understand it and so, cause it was looking so similar to just like plain HTML in the way it was rendered, right? So, it was, we'd like to build this POC basically, within a week. And then, it took me like another, like half week, week or so to implement it really in the product with everything they wanted to do. And then, there was this defining moment, okay, of like, I recall this moment. Like, you click this button in your own like UI and say, "Okay, let's merge it to production." It goes live, really just all the tests ran through, kind of like it went live and then you see it's deployed. And say, okay, now all the users are seeing that piece of code running, right? And then suddenly, the browser stopped crashing. Like you had users, "Hey, it's working for me." And that was like, for me, this thing was a, that was very defining the way I started to look at, okay, what value tests bring, what value documentation brings, what value like other parts within the company bring regarding knowledge we have and constraints. And yeah. That was, it was a fun one or so. And I think it helped a lot in the journey for the company.Kovid Batra: So now, like just going back and thinking about the same incident, what do you think that one thing drove you towards solving this problem? Like, what comes to your mind? Was it your curiosity to explore something else or was it something like the need of the hour and there was no escaping it? What pushed you to actually go forward and take up this challenge?Roman Kuba: Like, I was basically the only front end developer back then, right? I was the only one able, like to fix it.Kovid Batra: Yeah. So, it was more of a question of survival for you then. Roman Kuba: Yes. It was, like for us as a company, it was really, we have this product, we want to sell it, like this customer is curious, right? But if I have like this negative connotation with our product where people say, "Oh, it's not working." That's just not great, right? And for you as a startup or so, I think you always need to make very conscious decisions on what you do, what do you focus on, right? There's always like ideal solutions to say it is the best solution you can build or the other one is like, okay, what is the solution I can build now that just provides the most value to our users, right? And sometimes, even the value for the user and the ideal solution, they just go in very separate ways, right? And I think that is the thing I just learned at this point or so, when do you prioritize the right pieces of code? When do you kind of like look at what do I really need to invest in long term as a company? And it also changed a lot of my perception when it kind of, concepting things about like, where do metrics play a bigger part in the way what I build, right? like I started to weigh, look more for like performance metrics from the start. I'm looking at really edge cases in how I build things, how fast am I actually in deploying and recovering from these kinds of things. So, yeah. Ideally, if I can go incrementally forward with these kinds of changes going forward, that's always like the better approach than just say, throwing everything over the fence and restarting. That was more just like escape hatch because we had a really big problem. But usually, always making smart decisions with the constraints you have in mind and say, "Okay, what do I need to make as a small step to bring me closer to the ideal value I want to create for the user?" And my ideal solution can be the really North Star, but it shouldn't be my first stepping stone.Kovid Batra: First step towards that. Totally. I think it's a great, great piece of advice. And being in that position and taking that call, I think is the hardest part. Like, when you talk about it, you can say that just keep that balance on, like, don't go for the ideal solution, just look at what's the next best step. But that really requires some level of research, some level of understanding of what should be the next first step, because you can end up being in a tech debt situation for things like these that you have been doing. And it could be that you might delay the delivery. So, I think great piece of advice, but if I have to ask you, what exactly is that framework or even if it's not a defined framework, how do you take that call that, okay, this is going to be the first step. What's that feeling that you get when you see, okay, this is what I'm going to implement and this is what I'm going to leave for the next step. How do you decide that?Roman Kuba: I would say always like to weigh a little bit, the risk, right. Especially in a startup, like everything that you do has a lot of risk involved, right? If you build new features, have you validated them with users, will users like them and these kinds of things, right? And for me, it's always like on one side, I want to kind of like, I don't want to say minimize risk, but I want to keep the risk to a low amount of like effort when it comes to my previous investment. For me, like if I need to spend like a month of building something and there's super high risk involved in like, if it's even a month spent well, right? That's something, especially in the startup world, a month is like a ton of time. You're not, you're never getting this back, right? So, if you say, "Okay, that's for me, actually a step I can take. That takes me only like a week." Right? And maybe it's even like a higher risk or so, or like a lower risk in this case, right? Then I think that's always like the better thing to do. Even if you say like, okay, maybe it's, maybe I then need another month or afterwards to validate what I'm doing or so. And then later, a user says, "Yes, it's the right journey." Then you invested a week, right? But the thing is, so, if you invest a month and then it's like the bad thing, it's, yeah, you're not getting this back. But having a week and then spending an extra month to say, "Okay, yes, it was a good idea." That is how I usually kind of try to look at things. Yeah, that's the thing. Just getting you to the goal and getting the confirmation that like you don't waste your resources. That is, for me, the big thing.Kovid Batra: Makes sense. Just to add to it, I think a lot of times, we as developers make a decision purely based on the effort it's going to take and we just find the shortest paths to it. What I loved about your narrative is that there was no single point when you were thinking about the effort that would go into it. You were always thinking from a customer standpoint, like what value should be delivered right now. So, even without you saying, I'm just taking this from you that thinking for the customer, delivering the value should be the primary objective in your mind. The effort, whether it is one week or 10 days or diving into a new technology to ramp up your learning and do stuff, I think that never became the hurdle for you. It was always just the path that you have to take to deliver that value. So I think, amazing, Roman, I think I already feel inspired from the way you are thinking and doing things. All the best to you for your upcoming endeavors and may you shine like this ever. On that note, I think I would ask for one last piece of advice for our audience today from you as an engineering leader, as an engineering manager, people who are aspiring to be that what would you like to tell them?Roman Kuba: That's a fun one. I would say, the engineer in me would say, like really focusing on the value is the number one priority because your user, they just don't care which piece of tech you're using, right? They're not caring which framework you're using and all this kind of stuff. And it's for developers, very uncomfortable. And this thing I needed to learn. But making a decision that says, okay, even if it takes you a little longer, what is the thing you want to create for the user for them to get the benefit, right? That is for me, the number one thing. Start thinking about the value you want to create. The leader in me just says or so for anybody, because I went through this journey, right? Like being a developer, then leading a front end team, then stepping up to become an Engineering Manager, right? What I always did and do to this day is like really honestly caring for the people you work with, like understanding their ambitions, understanding what they want to achieve, right, or so. Like, everybody, even they, when we talk about tech, right, they also have fears about like, do they make the right decisions, right? Really genuinely be interested in what people think, how they feel about certain situations, right? Because in this case, you also want to create value for the people that you work with. And I think that is the number one thing, like yeah, generally care for each other in this kind of case or so. And do this journey on a startup or a tech product that you're ever building, like together. And yeah, that's my advice, I would say.Kovid Batra: Great, Roman. Thank you. Thank you so much for this advice and thank you for your time today. We'd love to see you on the show again once we hit a benchmark where we have another episode and we would love to call guests like you back on the show. Really loved the talk.Roman Kuba: Thank you, Kovid, for having me. It was a pleasure being here.Kovid Batra: Thank you, Roman. See ya!Roman Kuba: All right. Take care. Bye-bye.
In today's competitive tech landscape, engineering teams need robust and actionable metrics to measure and improve their performance. The DORA (DevOps Research and Assessment) metrics have emerged as a standard for assessing software delivery performance. In this blog, we'll explore what DORA metrics are, why they're important, and how to master their implementation to drive business success.
DORA metrics, developed by the DORA team, are key performance indicators that measure the performance of DevOps and engineering teams. They are the standard framework to track the effectiveness and efficiency of software development and delivery processes. Optimizing DORA Metrics helps achieve optimal speed, quality, and stability and provides a data-driven approach to evaluating the operational practices' impact on software delivery performance.
The four key DORA metrics are:
In 2021, the DORA Team added Reliability as a fifth metric. It is based upon how well the user’s expectations are met, such as availability and performance, and measures modern operational practices.
These metrics offer a comprehensive view of the software delivery process, highlighting areas for improvement and enabling software teams to enhance their delivery speed, reliability, and overall quality, leading to better business outcomes.
DORA metrics provide an objective way to measure the performance of software delivery processes. By focusing on these key indicators, dev teams gain a clear and quantifiable understanding of their tech practices.
DORA metrics enable organizations to benchmark their performance against industry standards. The DORA State of DevOps reports provide insights into what high-performing teams look like, offering a target for other organizations to aim for. By comparing your metrics against these benchmarks, you can set realistic goals and understand where your team stands to others in the industry.
DORA metrics promote better collaboration and communication within and across teams. By providing a common language and set of goals, these metrics align development, operations, and business teams around shared objectives. This alignment helps in breaking down silos and fostering a culture of collaboration and transparency.
The ultimate goal of tracking DORA metrics is to improve business outcomes. High-performing teams, as measured by DORA metrics, are correlated with faster delivery times, higher quality software, and improved stability. These improvements lead to greater customer satisfaction, increased market competitiveness, and higher revenue growth.
Analyzing DORA metrics helps DevOps teams identify performance trends and pinpoint bottlenecks in their software delivery lifecycle (SDLC). This allows them to address issues proactively, and improve developer experiences and overall workflow efficiency.
Integrating DORA metrics into value stream management practices enables organizations to optimize their software delivery processes. Analyzing DORA metrics allows teams to identify inefficiencies and bottlenecks in their value streams and inform teams where to focus their improvement efforts in the context of VSM.
Firstly, engineering leaders must identify what they want to achieve by tracking DORA metrics. Objectives might include increasing deployment frequency, reducing lead time, decreasing change failure rates, or minimizing MTTR.
Ensure your tools are properly configured to collect the necessary data for each metric:
Use dashboards and reports to visualize the metrics. There are many DORA metrics trackers available in the market. Do research and select a tool that can help you create clear and actionable visualizations.
Establish benchmarks based on industry standards or your historical data. Set realistic targets for improvement and use these as a guide for your DevOps practices.
Use the insights gained from your DORA metrics to identify bottlenecks and areas for improvement. Ensure to implement changes and continuously monitor their impact on your metrics. This iterative approach helps in gradually enhancing your DevOps performance.
Train software development teams on DORA metrics and promote a culture that values data-driven decision-making and learning from metrics. Also, encourage teams to discuss DORA metrics in retrospectives and planning meetings.
Regularly review metrics and adjust your practices as needed. The objectives and targets must evolve with the organization’s growth and changes in the industry. Typo is an intelligent engineering management platform for gaining visibility, removing blockers, and maximizing developer effectiveness. Its user-friendly interface and cutting-edge capabilities set it apart in the competitive landscape.
Understanding DORA metrics and effectively implementing and analyzing them can significantly enhance your software delivery performance and overall DevOps practices. These key metrics are vital for benchmarking against industry standards, enhancing collaboration and communication, and improving business outcomes.
In the latest episode of the ‘groCTO: Originals’ podcast (Formerly: Beyond the Code), host Kovid Batra welcomes Glenn Santos, VP of Engineering at PDAX. Glenn is also dedicated to empowering developers to become leaders with his initiative ‘eHeads’, a community for engineering leaders to exchange experiences and insights. His vast experience includes valuable contributions to renowned companies such as Salarium, TraXion Tech Inc., and HCX Technology Partners. The discussion revolves around ‘First 90 Days of Leadership, DORA & SonarQube’.
The episode kicks off with Glenn sharing his hobbies and life-defining moments, followed by an insightful discussion on how Glenn as a VP of Engineering manages his role, the company’s mission, and day-to-day challenges. Further, he shares strategies for aligning developers with business goals and navigating compliances in FinTech while maintaining velocity. He also shares his 90-day draft for building trust in the initial days as a leader and highlights the use of DORA metrics and SonarQube to measure team success, address integration challenges, and plan targeted improvements.
Lastly, he offers parting advice to aspiring leaders and engineering managers to embrace leadership opportunities and prioritize personal growth over comparing themselves to others’ progress.
Kovid Batra: Hi, everyone. This is Kovid, back with another episode of Beyond the Code by Typo. Today with us, we have a special guest. He’s currently VP of Engineering at PDAX, which is one of the best crypto and digital asset exchanges in the Philippines. He’s also known as the organizer of eHeads, a fellowship for local engineering leaders. His trajectory of career has revolved around mainly helping others work better. So he’s a passionate tech leader with a lot of compassion and empathy. Welcome to the show, Glenn. Happy to have you here.
Glenn Santos: Thanks. Thanks for having me.
Kovid Batra: Great, Glenn. So, before we start off and learn some great stuff from you, from your experience, we would love to know a little bit more about you, like your hobbies, your day-to-day activities. So quickly, if you could introduce us with yourself and tell us about your life-defining moments and some of the best experiences that you have had so far, your hobbies, how you unwind your day, I think that would be great.
Glenn Santos: So probably, my most life-defining experience was when I discovered TechCrunch before. So, when TechCrunch was just starting out, I was just a usual rank-and-file worker in a big company. I wasn’t a developer at all. So, when TechCrunch published like 10 ideas on how to create a startup, these were the ideas that they thought would boom. I found one that was particularly something that Filipinos here where I am from could do, which is some sort of labor arbitrage. So, it’s called outsourcing now. It’s very popular across the world. But at that time, we did not have the technology to make it easy, so I had to build my own forum, I had to create my own website, and do all the other stuff needed to get that business up and running.
For my hobbies, I’m actually an avid fan of cars. And I’m also a foodie, as they call it. So, I like trying new foods. Technology-wise I still read, like, Hacker News to keep up-to-date. But I also mix it up with some newsletters to supplement my knowledge in engineering management. And I share my learnings in my LinkedIn. That’s maybe a quick run-through of what I, yeah, what I’ve done.
Kovid Batra: Yeah. Yeah. That really helps. Thank you so much for this intro and coming to the main section, the main discussion, like when we want to learn something from engineering leaders like you, I think the best would be to start with your current role wherein if you could just tell us, what you do as a VP of Engineering at PDAX, what PDAX exactly does, and what your day-to-day challenges are. I think let’s get started from there first.
Glenn Santos: So, as VP of Engineering, I handle most of the people side in the engineering management role. So, my focus is really on people and the processes that enable them to work better. So right now, one of my initiatives in the company is to roll out DORA metrics and SonarQube. In my day-to-day, I actually do 1-on-1s, I join meetings with engineers and I also help plan out what, since we’re at the start of the year, I’m helping plan out what we’re going to do for 2024.
Kovid Batra: So, when you say you are planning what is gonna go out for 2024, I mean, this is basically what a VP Engineering would be doing, like connecting the business to the tech side and, like enabling the teams to be aware of what we should build and what strategy we should follow. So, I think this is one interesting piece. And this is one of the challenging things of a leadership role where you bring in the business and align it with the technical strategy. How do you exactly do that? And if you would share some of your experiences with aligning your teams to that technical strategy which ultimately aligns with the business goals. So, how do you do that?
Glenn Santos: So, first I need to understand the business goals for this year that’s going to be actually rolled out next week. But right now, it’s pretty clear what our direction will be business-wise. So on my end, I have to translate that into something that will help the engineering team with the help of product, of course. In our organization, product is separate from engineering. So, we align ourselves with each other so that the features that we build are according to that roadmap from the executives.
And aside from that, I also have to make sure that we keep code quality high because one of the things that I’d like to implement is that we build features more quickly. So, that’s enabled by better code which actually is a very good flywheel that contributes to the speed of development as well. So, we can do more with less once we have better code.
Kovid Batra: That totally makes sense. When it comes to aligning the team with these goals, it’s always a challenge for making the developers intuitively or naturally aligned with these goals. So, what exactly would you do in your meetings or your day-to-day work to ensure that these people are on a day-to-day level aligned with the business goals and the work that they are doing? Because it’s always a secondary effect, right? Like, the developer builds the code, ships it, and then ultimately, they see the results when the features are being adopted or your system is getting faster. So, it’s always a second-order effect. So, in day-to-day, how, do you make sure that they relate to that second-order effect goals and get rewarded with that actually?
Glenn Santos: So, when we’re building things aside from the regular, I think most of your audience would be familiar with the stand-ups and the catch-ups with product and the entire team. So, that’s part of it. But another part is, I always reiterate during our own engineering meetings, why we’re doing these things because we need to connect that with their own motivations. Each person has a different motivation, but I’m hoping that most of our engineers are motivated by growth and learning as well as achieving something that’s impactful. So, we share metrics in our meetings. We share how the users are accepting their features. And we also want them to, like connect the goals of whatever they’re doing with their own personal goals. So, we’re a fintech company that’s focused on wealth, increasing wealth. And most of our engineers are actually crypto traders as well. So we give, we roll out initiatives like helping them learn more about crypto and also how to handle their own funds. So that’s also something that we strive to do at PDAX.
Kovid Batra: I think that’s the best thing that you can have, like the people who are building the tool for a user, they themselves are users of that product and they understand the problem statement, they understand the solution around it. I think you answered the question really well here and you’re lucky to have that kind of motivation because in a lot of cases when people are building, let’s say some B2B products, the developers are totally disconnected from the kind of audience they have to build the product for, right? So, I think you’re in a good position and it’s a good strategy actually.
Cool. I’ll move on to the next question, Glenn. So basically, when you say that you are working with PDAX and it’s a financial institution, I’m sure there are a lot of compliances and security issues coming into the picture and, being a fast-moving company, you have to roll out so many features and in as less time as possible. So as a leader, how do you manage that balance? Because that is a little bit of a challenge. And when compliances come into the picture and specifically in FinTech, it’s a big, big challenge. So how do you manage that, your velocity while making sure that you are fulfilling all the compliances?
Glenn Santos: Yeah. Good question. Currently, we’re, there’s a really like a push and pull here. So, other teams, they need their central bank requirements because that’s part of the regulations, but we also want to build something quickly, which is also a mandate from our CEO, actually. So, what we do here is we actually set aside time for that compliance stuff. And, for the most part, it’s not handled by the engineers themselves. I let the managers handle that. But for example, we need input from tech leads or engineers, we need to bake that in so that it doesn’t disrupt their flow. So, I’m still a big believer of giving them a maker flow, these engineers, because that’s the only time where they can deliver quickly. And they’ll have well thought-out solutions to their, to the problems that we give them. So, we don’t want to interrupt that. But at the same time, we also want them to be communicative and collaborative. So, I think having those standups and having them work more async is actually key here so that they can contribute when they need to, but not, we don’t, like rush them into contributing these admin tasks.
Another thing is that we want to also build rapport with these other teams who are not technical, who might not understand what we’re doing so that when we’re, like a bit delayed when giving responses because we’re working on other stuff, we can smooth things out. And that’s actually another part of our like what we’re doing in the company currently, some process improvements so that these asks from external parties are handled well.
Kovid Batra: I think this is a good strategy where you are segregating their work to an extent where they don’t get interrupted in the flow of work on an everyday basis, but also they’re aware of things that are going on and they understand the context of it so that, as you said, like when they need it, when they need to contribute in that direction, they have that context and they implement it accordingly. So, yeah, I think balancing this on a day-to-day level is the key here probably because you don’t know when things go more into that direction where you are interrupting them every time. And then, there could be situations where they’re not completely aware of what’s going on on the compliance side and they end up building something which doesn’t fall into the picture and they have to rework. So, I think the balancing act is a must here, which I’m sure you’re doing. And you joined PDAX I think very recently, it’s most likely one year or so.
Glenn Santos: Less than a year actually.
Kovid Batra: Less than a year? All right. So, I think this is also an interesting piece, coming in at a leadership position and building that trust with the team. Right? So, this is something where I see a lot of people struggle, like people just don’t take the authority. In today’s world, at least they don’t just take the authority. They want to, like be influenced in a very subtle, different manner from the leaders. So, how are you handling this role? How are you handling building of that trust with the team in this initial year?
Glenn Santos: So, when I started, I actually, before I even started, I interviewed all the leaders that would be under me and I’ll be working closely with because I wanted to establish that initial rapport. I wanted to know if we clicked because for the most part, you don’t want your reports to be, like going against you. So, you want to have some harmony. When I started, I also actually, and I still do frequent 1-on-1s because I want to get to know them not just for their work, my direct reports who are engineering managers. I also want to know, what makes them tick, what they’re really like, and maybe some of their interests outside of work. So, that’s part of it.
And aside from that, for the engineers themselves, I’ll start doing some skip-level 1-on-1s as well so that I get a holistic picture of the engineering team. But, when building trust with them, I’m very transparent and open about what we’re going to do. So, I always reiterate that our goals for this year are code quality, this is how we will be measured, and I also want people to be more learning-focused this year. So, I’m really hoping that that aligns with them because one thing that I’ve taught recently is that you cannot give people motivation. They have their own motivations. You just have to align yourself with them so that they can do their best work.
Kovid Batra: Anything that you specifically follow when you join in? Any basic rule or format or template that you follow that, okay, whenever I’m going into a new position as a leader, like this is something that I should continue doing for some time.
Glenn Santos: Yeah. I actually, since I’ve joined a few companies recently, I’ve actually created my own 90-day, like my 90-day draft on what I should do in the first 90 days. So it’s split into 30, 60 and 90. So, while the goals are not that set in stone, I do want to get as much information about the organization as possible in the first 30 days, as well as talk to as many people in the organization. Yeah. So I go to, I actually go on-site, we’ve returned on site already, and I need to talk to as many people because for our companies, you have to interact with people who are not in tech, maybe some people in operations, some people in sales. So, you’d want to build that rapport with them so that they understand you and you understand them when they have things that they ask from you.
Kovid Batra: Right.
Glenn Santos: Yeah, so that template has been very useful for me. There’s actually a book out called ‘The First 90 Days’ I think, that I use as a basis.
Kovid Batra: Perfect. Great. Glenn, the last thing which I want to touch on with you in this discussion is something that you just mentioned you have taken up as an initiative: setting up the DORA metrics. So, DORA metrics is probably one aspect that I want to understand. But broadly, I want to understand what’s your way of measuring the success of an engineering team. Like, if your team is doing good, how do you define that for the team and how do you make sure that everyone is aligned on those KPIs and metrics, maybe DORA metrics? And, what all goes into setting up that momentum for the team so that everyone is motivated towards those? That they just don’t feel that they are under a microscope when you are talking about KPIs. They should naturally feel to work on those KPIs when they are working on a day-to-day level. So, I just want to understand this whole piece from you.
Glenn Santos: So, one of our, I guess our rallying cry this year is to be better engineers. So I’m pretty sure most engineers want to be better. So, DORA metrics, I also tell them that this is not actually some sort of measurement that we use just for that sake or to, like rank you. I want to use it to really create better engineers because when you follow the metrics, you’ll naturally hit roadblocks. Engineers love problem-solving, so this is one way to, like attack that part of the brain that loves feedback. It’s a very quick way to reinforce the feedback loop. That and SonarQube, which is also an automated way to collect metrics.
So, people love gaming, and we’ve seen that gaming is very very effective in producing behaviors that we want. And this is one way for them to really see if they’re doing well, they’re publishing clean code, they’re creating code that has no bugs, no vulnerabilities, so we want that. And also, it’s a team metric more than an individual metric, because the emphasis of DORA is really on teams. I want them to be more collaborative. So, if it fails, we’re not singling out one person. I’d rather tell the team, “Hey, you’re not doing well, help each other out, raise these metrics so that we can deliver better products to our customers.”
Kovid Batra: Right. Makes sense. Apart from building this first-level alignment of the team towards these metrics, what challenges did you see while implementing these success metrics for the team? And any specific example? So, I’m not sure if you have implemented it yet or not, but, let’s say, if you’re looking at implementing it, what would be your go-to strategy? What would be those one or two important metrics that you would be tracking? And how, again, you would bring that alignment with the team that, okay, these are the right metrics that we should be focusing on right now?
Glenn Santos: So, we’re actually in the process of implementing these metrics. We’ve ranked them accordingly. One thing that really stands out that I’d like to measure is the reliability of our code. So, that’s automatically measured by SonarQube. So one thing that I really emphasize here. One of the roadblocks, sorry, that we’ve come across is that if you’re using systems, different systems for like CI/CD or another company for your repos and maybe another company for your servers, it might be best if you streamline these first because that’s one of the challenges that we had. We had to string them together and DORA metrics is ideally collected in real time. So, for now, we’re not collecting it in real time. But, if for example, everything that you have is in AWS, it might be simpler or everything you have is maybe in Atlassian, that’d be simpler. And probably one of the people’s side challenges of implementing metrics is actually getting them to integrate, especially if you have lots of repos.
Kovid Batra: Yeah.
Glenn Santos: So, having time for them to do that, that’s usually the challenge. Do they do the features or do they do these integrations? So, I have to work with product, say that we need to slot this in. Maybe, you can slot this in, like before the sprint or during the sprint so that we can start collecting the metrics because we can only act upon the metrics once we’ve collected them. And yeah, we’re actually at just that part right now.
So, the next phase would be creating a plan, how to improve those metrics. So, we are not there yet, but we don’t want to plan ahead because that might involve, you know, we say that this is wrong, but our metrics would say that actually we’re doing okay here. So, we can focus on other metrics that are not up to par. So, we can put our engineering efforts there. So, it’s more targeted and has more impact.
Kovid Batra: Yeah. I think it also makes sense. Like, you cannot really jump the gun here. The whole point of having metrics is to first understand the problem. So, if you will just say that, okay, I will pick up this metric and start working on it from today itself with the team, that might not actually align with the real improvement areas. So, I think the thought process that you have right now for implementing these metrics makes a lot of sense. Like, first-level implementation, getting in place, getting that data in place, people looking at it regularly. And from there, you will start getting those indications where the inefficiencies lie. Just for example, if we talk about change failure rate, right? This is one of the important DORA metrics that needs to be tracked. So, if in your team, there are a lot of failures once you release to production, then that becomes the area of focus. And then, you start working towards it, taking measures towards it. But, in the beginning itself, if you say that okay, let’s start working on change failure rate, and surprisingly, your team is doing good on that metric, the team would say that why are we doing that? That would make it lose its purpose. So, it totally makes sense to look at it very deeply and understand at every team level which metrics would really work out for them. It’s not that for a particular team, the same metric that is working out would work for the other team also. So, it’s a process. I think the way you were taking it up, like phase-wise is something I would say is the right way to go about it.
And, great. I think, Glenn, it’s really nice to understand these things when you’re implementing them hands-on. I’d love to know more insights from you when you do this implementation. Maybe we can have another session, another podcast where we discuss about how you implemented those metrics and what rewards you got out of those. So, great. I think, it was a great, great talk. And before leaving, I would love for you to give parting advice to our aspiring leaders and aspiring engineering managers who are listening to this podcast, how they should move ahead in their career.
Glenn Santos: So, one of my big pushes really is, and you can see it in my LinkedIn that I want developers to become leaders. We don’t have enough engineering leaders actually, and not enough developers are interested in leading. So, my advice is for people to try it out. You can pedal back if it doesn’t really fit you, but it might be another way for you to grow. So,, right out within your own company, maybe you can help another startup out. And when you’re going through this career journey, it’s not really for you to compare yourself with others. Other people would have done pretty well and other people might have really not progressed that quickly, but don’t compare yourself to them. Compare yourself to what you were, like maybe one year ago, five years ago. As long as you’re, like progressing in a good pace, I think your career as an engineering or engineering leader or an engineer would really go far.
Kovid Batra: That’s really great advice. And I think the best part I felt is that you said, “Keep on trying it with other startups and companies.” So, I think having that hands-on experience and being in those situations would really, really build that quality in you. Like, reading books or just listening to a few podcasts might give you some initial framework on how you should do it. But the real belief I would say comes in when you have done it hands-on multiple times, probably.
So, great advice and thank you so much for this amazing, amazing discussion. I would be more than interested to talking to you again about your experiences of implementing DORA and handling your team, maybe six months down the line, how it went down and how it went up. So, let’s get in touch again. Thank you for today. I’ll see you soon.
Glenn Santos: Thanks. Thanks, Kovid. Great to talk to you.
Kovid Batra: Thank you.
In the latest episode of the ‘groCTO: Originals’ podcast (Formerly: Beyond the Code), host Kovid Batra engages in an insightful discussion with two dynamic engineering leaders: Francis Lacoste and Miroslaw Stanek.
Francis has formerly worked with Heroku and Salesforce & is now a VPE and CTO Coach specializing in scaling up startups. Miroslaw is the Director of Engineering & the PL Engineering Site Lead for the Poland R&D division at Papaya Global. He’s also the author of the newsletter ‘Practical Engineering Management’. Explore the theme of ‘Leading Dev teams through acquisitions’ by delving into their real-life experiences.
The episode kicks off with Francis and Miroslaw talking about their personal lives and hobbies. Moving on to the main section, they dive into the acquisition experiences and the pivotal hurdles faced by the engineering leaders in their respective organizations. They stress the importance of swiftly merging company cultures post-acquisition while addressing challenges in navigating the ‘us’ versus ‘them’ dynamic. The conversation also explores strategies for maintaining engineering team efficiency without sacrificing value delivery.
Lastly, Francis and Miroslaw share parting advice with engineering leaders who are navigating similar challenges.
Kovid Batra: Hi everyone! This is Kovid, back with another episode of Beyond the Code by Typo. Today, it’s a unique episode for us and we have some special guests. In fact, we have two amazing guests with us, Mirek and Francis. Both of them are accomplished engineering leaders. But they have one thing in common, their passion for contributing back to the engineering community. And that’s why we connected. So, Mirek has been on our show previously, but let me introduce him again. He’s the newsletter writer for Practical Engineering Management. He’s the Director of Engineering at Papaya Global. Francis is coming to our show for the first time. He’s an Engineering Leadership Coach. He’s a seasoned engineering leader and has worked with companies like Heroku, Salesforce and more. I’m glad to have both of you on the show. Thanks for coming. Thanks for joining in.
Francis Lacoste: Hi, Kovid.
Miroslaw Stanek: Yeah, thank you, Kovid. Hey, Francis. Thanks for having us.
Kovid Batra: Great. Francis, Mirek, it’s a basic format, like before we jump on to our today’s topic of leading dev teams through acquisition, I think it’s great if you could share some of your hobbies, some personal things about yourselves with the audience so that they know you a little more. So, we can start with you, Mirek, would you like to go first?
Miroslaw Stanek: Yeah, yeah, sure. Yeah, like Kovid said, it’s my second time in this podcast. but, for new people listening to us, my name is Mirek Miroslaw, depending on which pronunciation you prefer. Like Kovid said, recently I’m the Director of Engineering for the company Papaya Global. I’m also the site leader, leading the Polish R&D side of this company. And I also write a newsletter ‘Practical Engineering Management’. Basically, I try to help engineering leaders to maximize impact of their work and make their teams successful.
Personally, I’m the father of a three-year-old daughter. So, showing her the way, exploring the world, answering all of the questions. And, recently I’m also becoming a professional athlete. Yes, even after being 35 years old, you can still apply for the license. So, I’m an obstacle race runner. I have some aspirations, maybe, you know, not the box on the Olympics, but still, you know, I’m enjoying the ride and then hopefully, we’ll be able to share some successes over time. Yeah, so, thanks for having me.
Kovid Batra: All the best. All the best. All the best. Thanks, Mirek. Thank you so much for this lovely intro. Francis, your turn, man.
Francis Lacoste: So I’m Francis Lacoste. I’m based in Montreal in Canada. I’m an executive coach working mainly with CTOs and VPs of Engineering at startups. I help them specifically when they need to scale their team. And this is where we, they need to get really deliberate with culture. This is my passion, really making sure that teams have a great engineering environment like I’ve experienced. Before that, I was an Engineering Leader at Salesforce and Heroku and started my leadership career at Canonical, which was an open-source company, the one that made Ubuntu. And this is where I started learning remote management back in 2000.
Outside of work, I play in an electronic ambient band. I play a hands-free instrument, the Theremin, which is the space sound music type of sound that this instrument makes. Also, I have a long practice of meditation and I now also teach meditation with the Buddhist geeks, which is an online organization.
And it’s a pleasure to be here, Kovid. Thank you for inviting me.
Kovid Batra: Great, Francis. Thank you. Thank you so much for that lovely intro. I would love to hear you sing and play the music sometime.
Francis Lacoste: Well, we have a Bandcamp and we’re on Spotify, so I can give you the link in the show notes.
Kovid Batra: Oh yeah, that’s cool! Great. Francis, Mirek, we are here today to discuss around the challenges that engineering leaders face post-acquisition. And both of you come with immense experience. You have spent time in different-sized organizations. You have had startups, worked with companies as big as Salesforce, Francis, as you just mentioned. I’m sure you have had experiences of acquisition, right? And various types.
So, to start off, tell us about what kind of acquisition experiences you have had. And what were the biggest challenges as an engineering leader or as an engineering team you saw for the company getting acquired?
Francis Lacoste: Well, at Salesforce, we had many, there were many acquisitions. I came in with Heroku just after they had been acquired. And the Heroku acquisition was kind of a weird one because it took like that very long time. It operated somewhat independently. That was part of the main challenge. You know, the challenge is how do you integrate the culture? You know, it’s an integration problem. The big challenge was the ‘identity’ one. We’re identified as Heroku, but Heroku is now part of Salesforce. How can we be seen? How can we embrace the bigger identity of Salesforce? So, that’s how I would characterize its essence, the challenge we faced. And, it was not inside of it, but concise on, there were many other acquisitions, some more rapid where kind of you’re acquired and then there’s.. It’s a technology acquisition, so the product kind of shuts down very rapidly, things like that.
Those are other challenges, but there’s still this identity issue that’s very present there because usually people are not happy when losing identity.
Kovid Batra: Sure. I think we’ll come back to you for more details on that and discuss more things in depth. Mirek, what about you?
Miroslaw Stanek: From my side, basically the company I’m working for recently, Papaya Global acquired the previous company, Azimo, where I worked for almost eight years. What was the challenge of the acquisition? I think that the merging process in general, yeah. So, my role in the company was like, I would say, middle-level manager as a Director of Engineering who leads leaders who lead individual contributors. Basically, our main challenge was to make sure that the entire know-how which was acquired by, you know, by the bigger company is utilized because we came with know-how, we came with, you know, experience, and then the long stories, ways of working, but this is still in the sphere of, you know, of the potential which you can give to the company. And as a leader, as a manager, you need to be sure that this potential is somehow utilized. So, I think this is the biggest challenge. So, finding good places for the skills which we are bringing with you and you know, it opens all of the challenges around that. Yeah so, the ones about the organization, the culture, the team structure, and everything. So yeah, this is how it looks like in the general view.
Kovid Batra: Makes sense. Diving deep a little more into this challenge, how on a day-to-day basis are you navigating this situation? And Francis, please feel free to share your opinion or Mirek, please feel free to discuss anything that you feel should be known to the community also which you are facing as a challenge today. And, Francis comes with a lot of experience. I am sure he would have certain advice on how to navigate this situation.
Francis Lacoste: Yeah. I mean, I’ve coached people who went through acquisition as well, so that’s another source. I think one of the things that is very important to get going is to know what the context of the acquisition is. You know, there are multiple reasons for an acquisition. I’d say there are three main ones. So, the first one is usually a strategic product acquisition. Your business is acquired because, it’s seen as complimentary. I mean, there’s two, actually, there’s two there, you know, it can be because they want the revenue. So you’re in the same space as your competitor. And they just want, I mean, the one who’s acquiring is kind of a competitor and they’re kind of getting your customers and they want to add their customers there. That’s one strategic acquisition.
The other one, which was more like Heroku and I think in Mirek’s case here, is there’s a complementary product. You know, so it’s kind of Salesforce wanted to expand its reach in the developer space and Heroku was very at good traction in the developer space. So, it was okay work. And, and you’ve seen that in Salesforce. You know, we have a portfolio of companies they acquired, exact targets to add, like marketing capabilities to the CRM, Tableau to add analytics. So these are kind of products complimentary. And the idea is that when you go to sell to customers, you have, like a more comprehensive solution to sell them. So, that will drive more revenue.
Kovid Batra: Right.
Francis Lacoste: So, this is like the strategic acquisition and that will be very different, how it goes and how it will go away than these other two, which is ‘higher acquisition’, you know. So, you’re acquiring a company because of talent. You, you want to usually this will be as you acquire a small startup where you’re not really interested in their product or that technology.
Kovid Batra: It’s just the team that you need.
Francis Lacoste: It’s, “I want the team.” You know, there’s this, and usually it might be one person in the team. You know, there’s like a, somebody has like a very deep expertise. They’re not willing, they have a stake in the company, they’re not willing to jump ship. So they’re going to buy the company so that they can work for the bigger corporation. That’s a very different context than the first two.
And the third one is a tech acquisition. There, it’s not like you don’t really have traction. It’s not about your customers or things like that, but there’s complimentary technology. So, they want that tech. You know, you’ve solved one problem for them and instead of building it by themselves, they will buy you. And depending on that context, it will change a lot of how the acquisition will go.
But, what’s your experience with it, Mirek? Is it like, was it more technology acquisition, a talent acquisition or a strategy acquisition?
Miroslaw Stanek: Well, You know, in the, I think in the end, it’s those types of acquisitions, they have a lot in common because yeah, you can acquire the product, but in the end, you know, there are people behind the product. So even if you have this piece of technology, you still need to have those talented people who can maintain that, who can plug it into, you know, into the new structures and who can continue the growth. I think that, we are kind of mixing both things. Obviously, we expanded the new company’s portfolio, but we also brought, you know, fresh talent, new perspectives and fresh know-how to the problems which can also be the strategic problems for the company, yeah? The company wants to grow. The company wants to expand their portfolio. So bringing, you know, fresh talents who spent years building this or that can be a part of this acquisition.
Kovid Batra: Cool. Francis, do you have any questions that you wanted to ask Mirek?
Francis Lacoste: I think Mirek is right here in the sense that these three types that I said, or four, you know, if you split the first two, they will often overlap. This is what is always interesting about the Heroku acquisition, you know. Heroku was a strategic acquisition. So, what it means is that the first thing that they do is they will usually give autonomy to the product because you don’t want to kill the golden goose. And that creates a challenge because then it will mean that you will have, like kind of two independent or semi-independent organizations going by and in Heroku’s case, it took basically seven years to complete the integration. Actually, that’s not true. Like, five years after I joined, for the first five years, the technology team, I mean, Heroku had its own CEO and it was reporting to the product organization. So, the Heroku engineering organization was totally separate than the rest of the sales force and our engineering organization. And what we’ve seen is that when they did other acquisitions, that changed. You know, in some acquisitions, the technology organization is trying to be merged, you know. And this is where you kind of get these processes because you need to.. As if you’re independent, you can have these processes going on here and these processes going on over that place. And that’s fine. I mean, unless you need to align roadmaps, there will be friction, but those are the frictions you need to deal with. Whereas, if you’re acquiring the technology, then the first thing that we’ll do, or the talent, it’s kind of, we don’t care about how you’re working. Usually, the way it goes is that they will kind of say, “Here’s how we work, and you need to align with that.” Sure, we’re open.
And then, there’s a challenge of how we can influence the culture as per the acquisition, because you have good things. And there’s a size, you know, so it’s usually the smaller ones to influence the bigger one, but that’s very hard. And it will really depend on how you’re able to hook in into the process, build the relationships, all of these things.
So, even though all the problems will happen at some point, the schedule on which they will happen, these integrations will differ based on the integration type because the first thing they do when it’s a product, you know, at the acquisition, usually you can expect like they will merge the sales team rapidly. And in Heroku’s case, that took a while. But in other acquisitions, first thing, it didn’t take long. That the sales team at that exact target or the sales team, the go-to-market of Tableau were integrated in the go-to-market, the general go-to-market because you want to go to the customer with a unified product offering, even if the tech, I think the customer experience is we’re using two different products here. You know.
Kovid Batra: Right. Coming back to Mirek’s challenge after the acquisition. Having the capacity utilization done properly. Is that something that you have also experienced and is there anything specific that you have done at that point of time? Because I can also feel this that as soon as an acquisition is done, there is a lot of context to gain. There are a lot of things for people to first get on board with and then see how teams can be utilized at every level. And the operating style of every company that comes in would be different, right? So, there are multiple areas where you need to first get yourself onboarded after that position and then, ensure that everyone is utilized in the right place. So, Francis, a question for you. Have you experienced such a thing? And how did you navigate that situation?
Francis Lacoste: Yeah, I mean, Heroku’s, acquisition was kind of special in that case, you know, because these questions really took years to materialize. So, Heroku Engineering and Heroku Product were split, you know. And then, Engineering went into to report into the general Engineering org and same thing with Product. And then, these questions started to happen.
And then, there’s these things. Okay, well, is that capacity here? Can we use it for something else? You know, again, do we want, this is less prioritized and the challenge there was kind of often there’s not a lot of knowledge or you have to explain how your product and your technology fit together. And you have to understand how you need really to dive into the understanding of each part.
Kovid Batra: Yeah.
Francis Lacoste: And especially in a big organization, the decisions are made without really the details of the context. So they will say, “Oh, we can cut that.” You know? Or, we were going to ask them, but then it has a huge impact on the product because it’s..
Kovid Batra: It is not looking into deeply. Yeah.
Francis Lacoste: This is critical infrastructure. I mean, it doesn’t seem to be much, but if we don’t develop this, then we’re going to have problems or these things are going to have problems, things like that, dependency. And at the same time, there’s often, like not a lot of understanding of the other side of what it is trying to achieve. So, the advice I would give is really understand, if you’re being acquired, you need to understand very rapidly what the business of the acquirer is, you know, the company making the acquisition, how the tech fits. And now, you fit into that because you cannot really rely on them understanding what’s going on, you know.
Kovid Batra: Exactly.
Francis Lacoste: So, you need to understand them so that you can make your case to them, you know, in the terms that they understand.
Kovid Batra: Right. Right. Mirek, for you, after the acquisition, you were heading the engineering team there. When you moved here, the developers, the team members who were working with you, did they have an expectation from you, or were they looking up to you to sort their lives into this new space? And what exactly you did, like, I want to know, like your first-hand experience there, like what exactly did you do to solve these problems of them and for them and help them get on track or maybe you’re getting them on track right now, I don’t know, just share that experience with us.
Miroslaw Stanek: Yes. So, one of the biggest challenges for me as a, you know, not the senior manager, like I said, just the mid-level manager, is that I got a lot of questions with the expectations that I could answer all of them which obviously, wasn’t true. So, obviously, when the company is acquired, I assume that on the strategic level, you have a product. So, this new management thinks about how to use this product in their strategy. You have pool of talents. So, they think about how to use, utilize those talents. And they think like long-term. My role was bridging this gap between those strategic decisions which were still, you know, in discussions basically. My work was to bridge that with leaders and the engineers, to translate that into their, basically day-to-day you know, activities. It’s very similar to the things which you do as a fresh manager in a company, yeah? So, what you’d need to do in the first 100 days, for example, yeah? So, I assume that you need to learn as much as possible about business or the product. You need to understand what are the problems of the company that you need to solve. And then, looking at your team, at the individuals, you need to find the best fit for their skills in the scope of problems that the company has. Like I said at the beginning, we are joining the company with some experience, with a track record, but, you know, we need to somehow build this credibility because this is just the potential and we need to find a way to utilize this potential, how to start providing the value.
So, basically, my 100 days were full of 1-on-1s with people in all of the positions, from software engineers to their managers, to the directors, to also product people, marketing people, data people and others, to build context. For example, one of the projects which I led at the very beginning post-acquisition was building front-end infrastructure because we realized that with the monolithic system which we had back then, we couldn’t move as fast as possible. And actually, this was one of the, you know, know-how which we brought to the organization because we did some kind of that stuff in the past. So, you know, next to those big strategic things, the product and the entire talent pool, we also brought some, you know, very specific experiences. And actually, there was a problem in the company which we could solve with that.
One and a half year later, I can say that our entire front-end application is built on top of micro front-ends. We have tens of those compared to the single one, one year ago. So, this went well. But, like I said, it had to start with understanding that this is the real problem of the company and we have resources, we have experience, we have people who can address just that. So, this was one of the two experiences I had at the beginning of the acquisition.
Kovid Batra: Perfect. I think, great job there, first of all. And, one thing that I feel is that when you have traveled this journey, there is always some looking back and saying, “Okay, I could have done this better.” Right? So is there anything of that sort, Mirek, which you think you could share as an experience with the audience that this is something that you could do better? Like broadly, I feel you did the best thing. And as Francis also said, first you have to understand the business, understand the need. That’s the very fundamental. And you got to that point rightly, having 1-on-1s and aligning the teams, bridging that gap, bringing everyone on board, right? So, this is amazing. But if there was anything else that you could have done, and whatever you did, if you could do it better in some or the other way.
Miroslaw Stanek: I think that one of the super-important things which I underestimated at the beginning is the quick merger of the, I would say, companies’ culture. So, as long as you have ‘us’ and ‘them’, and we work this way and they work that way, it’s super hard to navigate, yeah? So, you know, the truth is that usually bigger organizations that are more bureaucratic, more formalized are acquiring smaller organizations that usually move faster. But also, you know, they are moving faster and breaking.
Kovid Batra: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, there are pros and cons.
Miroslaw Stanek: Yeah. So, I think that those are the, you know, non-technical challenges that you should address from day one to bridge this gap, to stop talking ‘us’ versus ‘them’, to see how quickly we can become one organization focused on a single goal because rather than, you know, expecting the company to adjust to us, we need to find a way to influence, to bring our experience, to help change the culture which works for all of us, rather than saying, “Okay, we work this way. And then, now the new way is not that effective. So I cannot, you know, push anymore once a day because of this or that or that.” So, I think that my role as a leader would be to answer all of those questions. Why we cannot push as fast as we did in the past? Why we have more compliance rules? Why this or that? I think that this is the thing that I should do more at the beginning of that position. Just provide all of the needed context to the former team or the organization to help them become, you know, good, empowered employees of the new organization. This is it.
Francis Lacoste: I agree completely with what Mirek said, you know. I mean, and this is similar to what we would have done differently. I think for us, it took really, too long. We stayed like ‘us’ with ‘them’ for way too long. And I mean, it was still going on, you know, when I left Heroku. In my last year, it was kind of, this was what I was trying to get to the team. It was, we were looking, we don’t know what is Heroku’s mission. And I was kind of, look, we get briefed every year at the company kickoff, which is this big event that sells for us where we have the strategy of the year, you know, and we want to know what our business is. We need to listen to that and tell how we fit into that, where, what is our contribution. Salesforce is in the business of digital transformation. How do we help customers with their digital transformation? And they were cool as a big part to play with, like at development there, but the ‘us’ and ‘them’ is strong. And this is where I said at the beginning, you know, it’s an identity problem. And there’s kind of a, the acquisition, the fact that you’re successful because you’re, you know, you’re at an exit. Especially the funders are having a dip there. Usually you’re bought, you know, I mean, even if it’s not for the valuation you were expecting, you’re still, “Oh! We’re a big deal. We got acquired.” You know? And at that time, like I said, I wasn’t there at the acquisition, but when Salesforce had acquired Heroku, it was a big deal. I mean, in Acre News and all sorts of that, people were saying, “Oh, Heroku is acquired by Salesforce because it required a lot of creds.” And I’ve seen other acquisitions where there’s some sense of pride and arrogance as being the smaller being and, “We are a startup”. “We’re nimble”. We’re really, I mean, “We have traction.” “This is why we got acquired, so they should listen to us.” “We know a lot. They don’t.” You know? So, there’s some arrogance and pride there. But the truth is, you know, especially, the bigger the differential, we need to get some humility and really start to get interested around, okay, why is there this? Because bureaucracy, it’s, I mean, it’s funny. When I was thinking, well, Mirek, you know, usually what is appreciated by the startups is the HR policies of the bigger corporations because they have more formal, you know, they have better insurance, health insurance, all that. That’s usually, “Oh, this is great!” But then it says, “Okay, this is how you should deploy to production.” Because there’s compliance issues and usually the bigger one will have to deal with this. Oh no! So, we need, as startups entering this world to kind of really get the humility of, “Okay, we probably have something to learn from them and it’s on us to tell, to understand what are the pain points and how we can solve it, probably.”
I loved Mirek’s story around the front-end development. It’s a great example. There was a thing and this is how we can solve it. I mean, Heroku was not successful in that way. You know, I mean, we kind of knew how to do deployments and all of that, but we were not really able to solve the deployment problem for Salesforce as a whole, you know. And so, Salesforce created its own Heroku, you know. And because Heroku, we were not interested. So, the arrogance is at the leadership level. So, you need to be able to jump shit and.. That was ‘ship’, I’m a little sorry. You need to jump shit in a way and embrace the new culture because otherwise you become like very protective of what you have and that’s, I mean, down the line, it’s not good. I mean, you see it, usually people will stick for their golden end, their leaders stick for their golden handcuffs and then they leave, you know, because they were not able really to integrate and find the value in that. And the people who stayed are kind of miserable. So it’s, yeah.
Kovid Batra: Totally, totally. One thing you just mentioned around, like how that cultural difference plays a role at different aspects of how you are operating. So, it could be something related to the hierarchy. People moving from a team which is small to a large organization would be happy about the HR policies, as you just mentioned. So, I have had an experience of working with an MNC and I have had an experience of working with a startup, right? The problem is that everyone, even the MNCs want or a large-scale organization wants that the team should move faster, right? Of course, without breaking things. And startups usually move faster, even though they break things, but they move faster. So, when this cultural shift happens, a startup gets acquired by a large-scale organization, keeping the team motivated that has been, like working with such a good pace and releasing features, having that clarity on what they are doing, seeing that impact, how does that transition work? Like I need to understand some detail around that part, maybe. Francis, Mirek, any one of you can answer that, like how do you keep your teams motivated with the fact that, okay, now we were running at 100, it’s going to be 50 now, right? That things could slow down for us, and still you need to keep them motivated on that journey. How would you do that?
Miroslaw Stanek: So, from my experience during the acquisition, as an individual contributor, you either join the existing team. So, this is basically like you would be hired to this company. Or the other way is you stay as the entire team, as the entire entity, and you build your stuff and your job is only to expose an interface or any ways of integrating your stuff with the rest of the product, with the rest of the business. I think that the second scenario is easier because you can still build things in your way. You can still have your, you know, ceremonies, ways of working. Sometimes you even keep the entire, you know, SDLC process or the tech stack. This is nice, you are just taking care of exposing the API or the contract or whatever.
When you join the team as an individual, I think it’s a good exercise for the company which acquires to see how their onboarding processes worked for this particular person. So, I personally look at the things of.. How quickly you can commit to production? For example. How much you need to learn? Do you have those materials which you can learn from? And then, how can you utilize them to push even a one line change to production? If you touch the production, it’s a success because you went the entire way and then you can start generating the real value and expand.
Yeah. So, I personally assume that the best motivation to people is to give them the possibility to generate value. And like I said, those are two ways of, I would say, maximizing that, yeah? And this is basically my experience from the last one and a half years.
Kovid Batra: Totally. Totally makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. What’s your take on this, Francis?
Francis Lacoste: Yeah. I mean, I agree here again, you know. The choice between the two will depend. It’s not necessarily in your hands, unfortunately. You know, I mean, if you’re able to maintain autonomy, it will depend more on the context of the acquisition or if it’s like, “We want to keep this product.” And so, they won’t refactor the teams or they will try to maintain the team’s autonomy, at least for a while so that the product can continue to grow and develop, you know. If it’s, like more technical or a hiring acquisition, then you cannot really expect autonomy. And then leveraging the onboarding process and that. And it’s hard because I mean, you’re really changing things for folks. And the trick is that even with the autonomy, there’s a clock ticking. You might not be aware of it because there’s autonomy, but autonomy is, as always, an expiration date, you know? At Heroku, it was like a lot of years. For most of other acquisitions, usually it’s more like a year, 18 months, 6 months, you know, and then, there will be, you’re on a timeline. And what is tough there as a leader is that you’re expecting to continue building the product as you are and you’re expecting implicitly or explicitly to integrate with the rest of the engineering org. You want to get ahead of it. Even if it’s, like just in six months or a year, you want to start building the relationships to.. How is it that you’re doing planning? How is it that you’re pushing to production? What is the integration aspect? And while at the same time, keeping your team autonomous. But you want to initiate these relationships. Get ahead. I mean, this is what I would have liked to do.
Kovid Batra: Yeah, yeah. I understand. And I think it’s good actually. See, setting the expectations brings a lot of more certainty to the situation and people get prepared for it. So, it definitely makes sense. First is that you give them that positive side of being there, keep them motivated and set the expectations right for the future so that they are prepared for it. So, I think that’s one good way of moving around like that.
Francis Lacoste: There’s something I want to add, you know, because I think I didn’t feel I really answered your question, initial question, which was about how we maintain the speed and agility, you know, of the original context. And this is the truth there, unfortunately, is that to maintain speed, you need autonomy. If you’re trying to centralize everything, this is when you centralize decision making, that things get slow and you get bogged down in, like, all of the coordination processes to make a decision. And this is what’s plaguing larger organizations. And so, there is an organizational philosophy at management. So, there is an uphill battle there because larger organizations that can move fast will add a lot of autonomy to the decentralized decision making. And that’s not really what is, like the common thinking in larger organization management. So, this is why it’s often unsuccessful. If you add up like the centralized decision making and the centralized process, you end up with these slow things. And that’s just the nature of it, you know, kind of. So, that’s the challenge.
Kovid Batra: Yeah, looking at the bright side would be the only option, like looking at the HR policies.
Francis Lacoste: And I mean, there are various.. The trick, and this is why I insist on relationship building because I mean, especially the larger organizations, the more they are, you can build some autonomy. Even though officially, there’s only a single way to do it, in practice, there will be multiple ways because of the history of acquisition and all of that. So, you can, if you know this, if you have the relationships when you did your training, your inventory of the lay of the land, then you know, okay, well, I can gain more time here and help steer that part of the organization into something that is more sane, you know. So, you can influence the culture, but you’re not going to transform it, you know, six months here. It’s like you’re starting a journey to nudge a little bit, the larger organization to work as a saner practice. We saw that at Heroku, especially around remote work. When I joined, it was to build a remote culture there. And when the pandemic hit, at Salesforce, the larger Salesforce organization, there was a lot of interest. Oh, what can we learn from Heroku? They’ve done that. So, our experience was welcomed and we were able to shift things, you know, in that area around remote work a little bit like Mirek was able to do around, like the front-end development. So, this is why understanding what the pain points are where we can contribute can help these micro-shifts.
Kovid Batra: Yeah, yeah. Makes sense. All right, moving on to one last piece of our discussion today around the acquisitions. This is a time of transition, turmoil, leaders themselves are figuring out that space, that foot into the new organization and trying to set up things with the existing team and the upcoming team. At this time, how do you think you can look at the efficiency of an engineering team? How can you go about measuring it? Or maybe, you should not measure it because there could be other aspects to look at at that point of time. How do you ensure that the people who are getting paid are delivering the value in that moment of transition? And how do you ensure that people are efficient?
Miroslaw Stanek: So, from my perspective, I take into consideration those four stages of team development, yeah? So, we have forming, storming, norming, and performing. And I assume that if the company is acquired, it’s major enough, fast-moving enough. So, I assume they are close to the ‘performing’ stage, yeah, where you measure the efficiency, speed, you can implement DORA metrics, you know, measure the number of deployments, whatever. But when you are acquired, I assume that you are coming back to the forming phase. So yeah, obviously, if you stay as a single team, single entity, you still can move really, really fast. You can keep deploying your stuff, you know, every single day to production. We are moving fast, but the question is if we are moving in the right direction, yeah? So, that’s why you can still keep measuring those things.
But I think that at the beginning, you know, of ‘forming’, you need to get to know people, company, business and everything. So, you understand how you can contribute to the company’s success rather than just moving fast in a totally random direction. So, I would come back to my answers from a few minutes ago. I would measure the onboarding time, basic stuff, how quickly you can, you know, come into production because, you know, you need to get access to your repositories, you need to go through all of the documentations and stuff like that. In the meantime, you know, just learning the company, learning the teams, your, you know, colleagues and everything. Then obviously, you will go to the ‘storming’ phase where everyone is debating on the ways of working and why we don’t work this way, but that way and so on. But, you know, after this turbulent time, then you can come back to the performing phase where you are optimizing, but only when you know that you are going in the right direction.
Kovid Batra: Makes sense. Perfect. Perfect. What’s your take on this, Francis?
Francis Lacoste: Well, what I’d add, again, it depends, you know. It’s really understanding how the acquiring organization answers that question because they probably already have a framework of how they’re thinking about performance, how they’re doing performance management, for instance. That’s also one of the usual sources of friction. We like the HR process, but not necessarily the performance, the way they do performance management, you know, because they have a very formalized one. Our smaller organization was always smaller. So in a way it’s kind of understanding how these questions are framed and processed at the bigger level. And then seeing, okay, how is that compatible with us? How are we going to need to adjust? And if you’re already doing that, you know, so that, because that will be an impedance mismatch that will need to be negotiated. And if you want to negotiate it, you’ll have to get ahead of it because otherwise the expectation will, you’ll just use ours.
Kovid Batra: Yeah, yeah.
Francis Lacoste: That’s very tough. The other around that question often it will be removing duplication. You know, it’s not so much, it’s everybody is busy because I mean, everybody’s busy in our company. Now, the question, like Mirek said, is kind of, “Are they busy on the right stuff?” And this is where I always recommend looking more for output, you know, what the outcomes are. I mean, not output, actually outcomes more than, like the busyness, you know, or our people’s time sheets or, you know, that, you know, oh, the number of pull requests or number of lines of code or all of these metrics which are kind of irrelevant in many ways.
But really, how is the business? Are we meeting our business outcomes? Giving transparency on how we’re making progress on those so that they can have conversations. But often, what happens is more kind of, you have a Platform Engineering team in your startup and we have a Platform Engineering, so we’re just going to merge those, you know, because obviously you should not have two Platform Engineering teams. I mean, that’s kind of naive, but it’s also a source of multiple confusion. But this is also a conversation you need to have, they’re going to come. So, you want to say, “Okay, what is this Platform Engineering team doing?” “What is their charter?” “How is it compatible with ours (or not)?” “Is merging really the right thing?” So, getting these collaborations going between peers at the startup and the bigger. If the teams have talked and have kind of an idea, when the Execs come in and say that you need to merge, you can actually say, “Well, actually, this is how we think we should be doing it.” And then, it’s much easier because the people with the maximum understanding of the context of the deals are able to weigh in on the decision.
Kovid Batra: Yeah. So here, let’s take your example here, Francis, when Heroku merged into Salesforce, there must be certain performance practices you would have already taken up, right? And then, there must be something that Salesforce enforces on the team, right? There must be some clashes over there. Can you give us an example of that? And how did you, as a leader, navigate your team and align them with that? So, it completely changes the way you are thinking, how you’re incentivized to do something in a team, right? And if that happens, it’s a big shift, according to me. How you handle that would be something that I would like to know.
Francis Lacoste: Yeah. I mean, two examples of that were, like the performance management, which I mean, Salesforce didn’t have a very formal one at the beginning. It came in later. But it required this one. The way they do promotions and things like that. So it’s kind of, okay, we need to align more with that. And it was about understanding this process & understanding how we do things. And then, there’s a phase where it’s about how we can continue to keep the spirit and the principles we have in that different process and hybridize the two. Another one was the career ladders. So, we had our own career ladders. And then, there’s kind of the, okay, well, these are the different roles. Harmonizing that. Often, I mean, the biggest job was managing expectations on both sides. Basically what we had was like an interpretation. This is that level. Here’s what that level means here. And you were seeing that even though officially, that’s kind of, you should not be doing that. I mean, the HR folks really hate that. But in practice, contexts are different and you need to have that adaptation. So, even though it was not recognized, it was happening all over the organization. It’s not like just a group who were doing that, but other teams also when they’re, kind of doing commentary on the official career ladder.
Kovid Batra: Yeah, of course. That’s there. Great, guys. I am out of my questions for now. It was lovely discussing all these challenges with you and having a discussion on all those practical tips that you shared. Any parting advice from both of you for the engineering leaders who are in a similar situation, what they should be doing, what they should be taking as next steps?
Miroslaw Stanek: So, from my perspective, I would say that your role as a leader is to find a good match between the skills you are bringing to the new company. You know, your team, the know-how the solutions, the product, to the problems which the new company has. And start, you know, start by doing that. Start by showing what’s the value of your stuff in the context of a new reality. And the quicker you sort it out, the quicker you become, you know, successful in a new organization.
Francis Lacoste: That’s a very good tip. So, two things for me. The first, most practical one is get the conversation going, you know, look at the org chart and find people who are in similar roles or where you can see that oh, if I were to look at this and it looks similar and I want to merge these things, start talking with those teams to get your team to actually start talking to these teams, just to get to know each other, to learn from each other, that sort of thing. Very informal kind of thing. It is just to encourage cross-organization conversations because that makes everything easier afterwards. You get to know people, you get to relate to them as humans. They’re not like a dam who wants to eat you or things like that. So, just encourage, multilateral conversation between similar roles and similar teams, between engineers, well, across the org. So, conversations. Then, same thing with the leader.
The other aspect that I say is kind of, keep in mind that there’s an identity shift that needs to happen, you know, from “we are this company” to “we are this bigger company”. The mission is changing, that sort of thing. And when there is an identity shift, there will be a grieving process, you know, because you’re losing an identity and you’re embracing a new one. So, be prepared to accompany the people in that journey, you know, of kind of losing the, “Oh, this is how we were.” And, “This is our startup times.” And things like that. The loss of that, because it’s a real loss, it will be an emotional impact. And then, so kind of acknowledging it and normalizing it, supporting people through it and embracing, helping them to embrace the bigger identity, “Hey, this is the new mission. This is bigger. We can do more things together.”
Kovid Batra: Totally. I think both of you, thanks a lot for such great piece of advice. Can’t thank you enough. Let’s keep this passion of contributing to the community going and let’s build great dev teams together, man.
Francis Lacoste: Thank you so much, Kovid, for providing this space.
Kovid Batra: Thanks.
Miroslaw Stanek: Thank you.
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