Engineering Productivity - is the squeeze worth the juice?

The most common question I get asked by engineers, leaders and investors is how fast is fast enough? Or, it's variation, we're happy with our delivery speed and safety, is chasing genuine continuous delivery worth the effort?

The short answer is yes; the effort is demonstrably worth it - for your team, customers and organisation. Just imagine:

💸 An extra (free) engineer per team

😌 Your reliability is a source of pride

👏 Your team champions their progress at talks and events

Longer answer:

Any software team has three never-ending challenges:

1️⃣ Are we building the right thing?

2️⃣ Are we building the thing right? 

3️⃣ Is our culture helping us with 1 and 2? 

Over 15 years of SaaS evolution has created a host of metrics on product performance from ARPU and CAC to NPS and churn; numerous signals help answer whether we are building the right thing.

Are we/they building the thing right? 

Quality and efficiency of software delivery have historically been subjective things to assess, which is confronting considering that software delivery typically is the highest cost for them. It doesn't matter if you're your team, renting someone else's (outsourcing), or even buying or selling equity in an organisation; it's irresponsible not to assess the delivery speed and safety with industry-endorsed benchmarks. 

The good news is that the industry has been validating benchmarks over the past eight years, most notably the DORA metrics (see Software Delivery - It's ok to measure it). Continuous delivery can now be quantified and benchmarked. The not-so-good news is that the DORA benchmarking is graded in low, medium, high and elite bands. For engineering teams continually trading new features against efficiency, the metrics lead to the challenge of 'High sounds good; do we need to be elite?' 

So back to the first question. Improving delivery performance may require significant time and money, so the question becomes, is it worth it?

Think of Engineering Productivity as the systematic improvement of value flow to customers, resilience teams and value already delivered, and in turn, happier customers and teams. Any and every incremental improvement is worth it. The following points help keep a return on investment conversation unbiased:

1️⃣ Speed and safety are strategic advantages. Multiple research programs align on elite performers being at least twice as likely to succeed in their market compared to the lower-performing competition.

2️⃣ Use data, not opinions. Self-assess your performance and be transparent about it. It's about quantifying waste, potential gains and risks. Look at the good, bad and ugly. 

3️⃣ Tirelessly pursue top performance. Avoid the 'high is good enough' trap, as this leads to, at best, leaving money on the table. At worst, the organisation will not confront their most limiting constraint(s).

4️⃣ Size doesn't matter - startups and enterprises both benefit.

Originally published on LinkedIn.