A Good Engineer is a Busy Engineer Right?
If we want high-performing teams, they need to be truly empowered
A good Engineer is a busy Engineer right? ... right?
A good Designer is a busy Designer right? ... right?
Software Engineers, Product Designers and anyone involved in building products are expensive. And they should be - the work they do is complex knowledge work and much is expected of them.
Because of that we should ensure 100% utilisation right? ... right?
Regardless of the Agile Development movement that is now the norm for building software, regardless of how poorly it's been interpreted and implemented in many cases, there's still a strong business perception that busyness is equal to value creation.
Even so called empowered teams are often expected to deliver something (output), even if the customer value and business impact they're looking for (outcome) does not actually require customer facing product or code change.
In the worst cases product teams (which is what we like to call them, but really they're just a development team) go blindly after ... well really anything that keeps their people busy.
Building features the team know customers don't want and won't use, constantly A/B testing and iterating with no real change in user behaviour, continuous discovery (it's just 'research' really) and early stage experimentation with no real understanding of outcome.
It all takes people's time but what is the real cost?
Engineers, Designers, Product Managers and all the other creators are even more expensive when the work they are busy doing drives no value for customers, resulting in no businesses impact - i.e. revenue.
High performance is not the number of stories points completed, an increase in velocity, number of things delivered each month or even lead and cycle time. Although these are good measures for a focus on efficiency, a high-performing team is one that can say: “We consistently get things to customers that they value enough to pay for.”
If we want high-performing teams, they need to be truly empowered. Where their time, effort and value is understood with the lens of the outcomes they achieve not the lens of the output they delivered.
I see the similar challenges.
I would add: If we want high performing teams, we need to allow space for thinking, not just doing. Thinking is one of the most valuable activities we can do. Yet, because it looks as though someone is idle, organizations are often not comfortable with it.