Exciting news, everyone: Together with Tobi Leonhardt, I am starting a small project to inspire. With our combined focus on high-performing teams & organizations and human-centric workplaces & cultures, we aim to have meaningful conversations around the topics on our minds daily. We also want to invite leaders to have those conversations with us.
In this format, we want to have short but meaningful conversations. We aim for 15 minutes per conversation and will keep them intentionally short, even though we could quickly expand for hours on each topic this series. We hope to spark AHA moments, trigger interesting thoughts and start conversations.
In this first release, we focus on what drives engineering experience and performance and if we can find 5-7 key performance drivers. We also discuss how Developer Experience is connected to Engineering Effectiveness.
Key Insights / Statements
A summary of the key insights and learnings we had:
People who enjoy their work more are less productive and creative (independently of the area of work) → Happy people are more productive.
Dimensions to look into when seeking to achieve high developer productivity are flow, feedback loops and cognitive load.
The technical and social side of work influence cognitive load.
Feedback loops include technical system feedback and feedback from humans about work.
Impactful conversations and collaboration are based on psychological safety and trust.
Collaboration increases the capacity for cognitive load.
Key performance drivers from this conversation
Psychological safety and trust as the foundation
Short feedback loops from colleagues, customers, and technical systems
Reducing cognitive load through small batches and work-in-progress limits, increasing capacity for cognitive load through collaboration
Continuous improvement through experiments on product, organization, and culture.
Additional Resources
You find the Notion page, the Mural of this session, and more information about us and how we work here.
Continue the Conversation
What are your thoughts on this topic?
What do your team and your colleagues think about this topic?
→ We would love to hear your feedback! 💬👇
Key Drivers for Engineering Experience and Performance