Nicolas Bortolotti’s Post

Engineering teams used to pioneer innovation by making complex tasks easy and quick. However, many engineering teams have now become bottlenecks. Of course, business expectations are high. But what makes some teams unable to add a small copy change for a week? 🤯 I don't know an engineer who sits and says: "I don't want to do it; I will go back to this *little task* in a week". Individually, we all want to do our best work. When the company we work for has an important task, we implement it as best we can. However, engineers are trapped when they start implementing something important for the company. Poor requirements, slow or unclear procedures, unnecessary checks and approvals, and manual workflow make engineers unproductive. And there's no guilty person — the problem is how we work and collaborate inside and outside the team. We cannot automate manual work because we need to know how work flows in the team and company. It shouldn't stay like this. We all want our engineering work to be streamlined. Everything should have its place and time, and the work should flow. With the above challenges in mind, I've launched Streamlined Engineering, a newsletter about creating efficient engineering workflows to shorten development lifecycles and achieve better results. 👉 https://lnkd.in/eu_vGKWx 👈 I explore automation tools and architectural and management patterns to make engineering teams' work smooth, productive, and enjoyable. New issues come every week, usually on Mondays. The first six issues are already waiting: 1️⃣ Start Now, Iterate and Saturate Later: https://lnkd.in/ee3HHBjT 2️⃣ Managing Bottlenecks = Managing Workflow Performance: https://lnkd.in/eNRqtmxA 3️⃣ One More CI: Continual Improvement: https://lnkd.in/eW-9_Uan 4️⃣ 4 Metrics To Measure Engineering Workflow Performance: https://lnkd.in/eG2NYdcX 5️⃣ Deploy != Release: https://lnkd.in/ewUTGQbR 6️⃣ With Compatibility in Mind: https://lnkd.in/e5v6M5q2 I'd love to hear your feedback on my content, especially if you think I'm deadly wrong. If you have any ideas, share topics you'd like me to cover. My aim is to learn and explore more options, focusing on realistic pain points that can be much more enjoyable. Cheers ✌️

Are you still relying on your issue tracker or using a spreadsheet to manually track the progress of cross-team engineering initiatives? If you nodded yes, this blog post is for you.

I'd argue that 90% of engineering leaders are on the wrong page when it comes to the purpose of their teams. The core responsibility of our engineering teams is not to write code. Surprised? Let's take a step back and see the bigger picture here. What's the real purpose of any business? To make money. Our engineering teams aren't excluded from this equation. Imagine a master painter, meticulously crafting every detail, spending hours to perfect his masterpiece. Yet, it collects dust in the attic. Why? It wasn't what the market wanted. All that time, effort, and talent got wasted. Switch that scenario to an engineering team. They're the artists. Code is their paint. Now, if they spend all their time crafting code the market doesn't need, what good does that do? In contrast, if our teams focus on understanding market needs and delivering solutions that clients crave, the code becomes a valuable tool, a money-making machine. Bottom line: The job of engineering teams is to make money, not just write code. What's your take? Is your team writing code or making money?

I'd argue that 90% of engineering leaders are on the wrong page when it comes to the purpose of their teams. The core responsibility of our engineering teams is not to write code. Surprised? Let's take a step back and see the bigger picture here. What's the real purpose of any business? To make money. Our engineering teams aren't excluded from this equation. Imagine a master painter, meticulously crafting every detail, spending hours to perfect his masterpiece. Yet, it collects dust in the attic. Why? It wasn't what the market wanted. All that time, effort, and talent got wasted. Switch that scenario to an engineering team. They're the artists. Code is their paint. Now, if they spend all their time crafting code the market doesn't need, what good does that do? In contrast, if our teams focus on understanding market needs and delivering solutions that clients crave, the code becomes a valuable tool, a money-making machine. Bottom line: The job of engineering teams is to make money, not just write code. What's your take? Is your team writing code or making money?

I'd argue that 90% of engineering leaders are on the wrong page when it comes to the purpose of their teams. The core responsibility of our engineering teams is not to write code. Surprised? Let's take a step back and see the bigger picture here. What's the real purpose of any business? To make money. Our engineering teams aren't excluded from this equation. Imagine a master painter, meticulously crafting every detail, spending hours to perfect his masterpiece. Yet, it collects dust in the attic. Why? It wasn't what the market wanted. All that time, effort, and talent got wasted. Switch that scenario to an engineering team. They're the artists. Code is their paint. Now, if they spend all their time crafting code the market doesn't need, what good does that do? In contrast, if our teams focus on understanding market needs and delivering solutions that clients crave, the code becomes a valuable tool, a money-making machine. Bottom line: The job of engineering teams is to make money, not just write code. What's your take? Is your team writing code or making money?

Frame Engineering Work According to Outcomes 1. The deadline matters, but going faster doesn’t.  To deliver this feature on time, engineering should keep speed-related metrics consistent, but they don’t need to improve them to achieve the goal. 2. Levers can be used to optimize the result and prioritize the work.  Finding ways to increase the cart size or the success rate at checkout can produce even better results for the business. 3. There is a financial goal associated with this work.  It’s clear to everyone on the team how their work impacts the business. If additional resources are needed to deliver the feature, it’s reasonable for engineering to pause other projects or ask to add members to the team. At the beginning of the project, the engineering leader should look at other work in progress and complete a simple cost-benefit analysis to properly prioritize work. They may discover that another project, which is focused on redesigning the mobile app, has a low number of weekly coding days because the team is investing in research. Since it’s still in the research phase, the team doesn’t yet know the financial impact of a mobile redesign. However, they do know the expected impact of the baseball bundle widget, so shifting resources to it from the mobile redesign will redirect those resources to generating revenue instead of investing in a long-term project with an unclear return. As the widget progresses, engineering metrics may reveal other changes that need to be made in order to meet the project’s requirements. For example, a high amount of Rework may indicate that work isn’t being planned properly, resulting in duplicated effort and wasted time. Or a large PR Size combined with slow Review Cycles may reveal that one person is handling all the PR reviews, so folks are batching up large amounts of work in each PR. With an understanding of the tradeoffs inherent in the project, and the knowledge that a delayed or poor-quality widget would significantly impact revenue, an engineering leader would likely decide to make a change to resolve these issues. They might, for example, consider adding a dedicated project manager (PM) to the team to help improve the flow of work. A cost-benefit analysis will show that adding a dedicated PM can improve Traceability, Rework, and developer productivity, allowing the team to release the baseball bundle widget on time. This can result in a net gain of the projected sales from the bundle in Q1 due to increased cart size and checkout success. Learn more on our blog. 🔗Link in the comments👇

When thinking about code vs business value, as an engineer, or team member - how does my behavior change? 1️⃣ Drill down the value: You understand why are you doing what you are supposed to do, where it comes from, what are the reasons behind it, and what is important for the end customer. 2️⃣ Be curious and clarify: You communicate openly about business. You are eager to listen, you proactively ask, you are capable of balancing product quality with value, and you suggest and confirm priorities. 3️⃣ Translate to tech: You showcase the ability to adapt tech solutions, and system design, to the value you're about to deliver. You keep a broader product/business perspective in mind and you're capable of balancing business with tech. 4️⃣ Translate tech to business: And vice versa, what is worth changing, and improving from a pure technology perspective needs to have business reasoning. The ability to communicate clear benefits to the business will save everyone a lot of frustration, and you'll be able to validate the impact on the business. This way you will be loved by "business" and you will be able to count on mutual respect and great partnership which is necessary for building a successful product.

I'd argue that 90% of engineering leaders are on the wrong page when it comes to the purpose of their teams. The core responsibility of our engineering teams is not to write code. Surprised? Let's take a step back and see the bigger picture here. What's the real purpose of any business? To make money. Our engineering teams aren't excluded from this equation. Imagine a master painter, meticulously crafting every detail, spending hours to perfect his masterpiece. Yet, it collects dust in the attic. Why? It wasn't what the market wanted. All that time, effort, and talent got wasted. Switch that scenario to an engineering team. They're the artists. Code is their paint. Now, if they spend all their time crafting code the market doesn't need, what good does that do? In contrast, if our teams focus on understanding market needs and delivering solutions that clients crave, the code becomes a valuable tool, a money-making machine. Bottom line: The job of engineering teams is to make money, not just write code. What's your take? Is your team writing code or making money?

6 to 8 months to transform a lackluster engineering team into a highly functioning, productive, professional and modern team. During the “upgrade”, productivity will be reduced before it goes up again, especially if they are actively building a product. 1 to 3 months to build a new team from nothing with the proper processes, technologies, architecture and so on. No productivity is lost because there is nothing to compare to :-) The time financial cost and operational complexities are greatly reduced when starting on the right foot.

I'd argue that 90% of engineering leaders are on the wrong page when it comes to the purpose of their teams. The core responsibility of our engineering teams is not to write code. Surprised? Let's take a step back and see the bigger picture here. What's the real purpose of any business? To make money. Our engineering teams aren't excluded from this equation. Imagine a master painter, meticulously crafting every detail, spending hours to perfect his masterpiece. Yet, it collects dust in the attic. Why? It wasn't what the market wanted. All that time, effort, and talent got wasted. Switch that scenario to an engineering team. They're the artists. Code is their paint. Now, if they spend all their time crafting code the market doesn't need, what good does that do? In contrast, if our teams focus on understanding market needs and delivering solutions that clients crave, the code becomes a valuable tool, a money-making machine. Bottom line: The job of engineering teams is to make money, not just write code. What's your take? Is your team writing code or making money?