Work Smarter Not Harder

Getting the teams motivated, excited, and driven about the org’s missions and objectives is not sufficient to guarantee a fast flow of execution. Often, the main challenge lies in effectiveness and efficiency of execution, in teams spending time on what matters less, or being slowed down by inefficient operations, tools, or processes.

Focus

The enemy of great outcomes is all the other “shiny” distractions that compete for an org’s energy, time and resources. Strong product-led organizations ensure that people’s time and resources are spent on what is most valuable to the business.

Excellence starts from an unequivocal clarity and focus on the one or few things that matter most to the business and customers. It starts with product leadership setting clear, simple, and focused priorities, and a culture that empowers teams to say no to the many efforts competing for resources, in order to stay brutally laser-focused on the one or few that really matter.

More than being disciplined about what to do, excellence relies on being intentional and disciplined about what not to do. Focus requires disciple. It is often hard and not attractive. Deliberate intentionality and discipline is essential to stay on track.

Efficient Systems

Once teams are clear about what matters most and empowered to say no to stay focused of what is most essential, they need to optimize their operations to maximize speed of flow and minimize inefficiencies. Continuous obsession about accelerating flow of change and reducing idle time is a must for high org productivity.

Driving efficiency starts from looking at the organization, its people, software, and processes as a wholistic system. Inspect all its components and the interactions within and identify the biggest opportunities for improvement.

Architecture

Highly decoupled lean architectures allow changes to be made and deployed frequently as they are localized to their specific local domain (ex: function of microservice), with no or minimum disruption to the rest of the system.

People

Org topology: Observe the value stream of change and spot inefficiencies. Organize the teams in a way where most common flows happen undisrupted or with minimum friction. If in the common case, a single change requires coordination of work between multiple teams, it is often a signal to consider re-organizing those teams to allow flows to happen end to end, undisrupted.

Teams Autonomy: highly effective teams create clarity and framework necessary to localize decision-making and avoid the need for progress to bottleneck on leadership reviews and approvals.

Processes

The 4 key metrics: The authors of the infamous book “Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps” identified four 4 key metrics to measure software development performance: Lead Time to Changes (LTTC), Deployment Frequency, Mean Time To Recovery (MTTR) and Change Failure Rate (CFR). The first two being an indicative of how fast a software organization can execute. Measuring lead time and optimizing its longest bottlenecks is often one of the highest potential accelerators. For a full plane view, optimizations should include how long it takes committed work to be fully defined and ready for engineers to implement.

Low barrier to entry through code democratization: One good common indicator of engineering agility is how easy for a new engineer to navigate code and make and deploy changes. Investing on use of plain simple architecture, easy to follow and very well documented code, trivial self-service tools is often a huge ROI and a solid booster to teams’ agility.

Software and Tools

Automation: Automating DevOps, CI/CD pipelines, tests, and other frequently repeated and time-consuming tasks is often one of the most valuable ROIs. Investment in automation should have a clear hypothesis on savings and prioritize based on ROI.

Modernization: Continuous modernization and refactoring of tools and architectures is necessary to keep the system simple, clean, current, up to date, and able to match or exceed agility and performance industry standards.

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