General Partner, Coatue
December 1, 2022
https://coatue-public-sd-prod-notionanalytics20231124135131568800000001.s3.amazonaws.com/scaling_up_engineering_productivity.html
How effective is your engineering team? Whether you’re an investor, an executive, a teammate, or a stakeholder, knowing whether the organization is effective is a critical but elusive question.
The context of the situation matters. Overall productivity may seem slow, such as when building up a complex backend system with no visual components, or it may seem fast, such as when the user interface is changing daily. But can you really trust your instincts without using metrics?
I wouldn’t recommend it. Large-scale software development organizations are complex adaptive systems that can’t be easily measured like their counterparts in industrial production. I’ve spent many years working with software engineering organizations, and I can say unequivocally that there isn’t a single metric or an easy answer to that question.
One common myth about developer productivity is that it produces a universal metric and that this "one metric that matters" can be used to score teams on their overall work and to compare teams across an organization and even an industry. This isn't true. Productivity represents several important dimensions of work and is greatly influenced by the context in which the work is done.
When the theoretical physicist Werner Heisenberg famously noted the observer effect, he may just as well have applied it to the domain of software engineering. Productivity measurements affect the processes and behaviors of the engineers. That is why there are no silver bullet metrics. As soon as a measure is put in place, people quickly adapt to optimize for the measurement, reducing its value. The engineers are too bright and results-driven to resist gaming the metrics, making them very short-lived indicators of effectiveness.
In my opinion, the best approach for building a high-performing engineering team is to focus on creating a culture of continuous improvement that leverages a collection of metrics and baselines. This collection provides a complete picture of the engineering organization’s effectiveness while resisting gaming due to its breadth.
In the content that follows, I will share some best practices, norms, and techniques that can significantly boost productivity. These principles have helped guide my own experience as an engineering team leader as I’ve scaled organizations from hundreds to thousands of employees.
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Scaling up engineering productivity Sections
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