At Vertex we are often asked to deliver more than a team - our CTO below describes his increasingly popular "grown up" approach to engineering management.
Outcome-driven engineering is an approach that focuses on the effectiveness of a technical team in terms of its collective impact as opposed to raw productivity. It involves a shift in emphasis away from common quantitative measures like sprint velocity to assessing the effectiveness of delivery iterations based on customer feedback.
Outcome-driven engineering will become an increasingly important aspect of the new normal post-Covid of distributed remote working. While there is value in technical leadership keeping abreast of canonical agile team metrics across their organisations, it is also vital to have a clear understanding of how those teams are impacting on customer delivery satisfaction.
There is no one single prescribed technique for creating an outcome-oriented engineering mindset in your organisation. A lot will depend on your specific context. For instance you may not have a direct channel to your customer in which case you will need to find a proxy for measuring customer impact. It’s better to see outcome-driven engineering as a toolkit of mechanisms you can review for suitability and introduce according to relevance. Some of the key elements are as follows:
Ultimately outcome-driven engineering is not just about implementing a checklist of mechanisms. It requires buying into and cultivating the corresponding mindset. The key aspects of that mindset are:
Outcome-driven engineering ultimately connects engineering effort directly to business value. It does so by focussing on obtaining direct and specific unvarnished feedback from the customer. In a sense this emphasis on customer obsession represents a form of radical candour for business.
There are some downsides to adopting an outcome-driven engineering approach. Introducing it within an organisation will typically require the integration of certain mechanistic enablers. For example, tech teams may find they need to add a feature flagging capability or introduce A/B testing. It’s also the case that not all businesses have customers that directly fit the bill. For instance, B2B organisations will need to find proxy customers. Arguably the biggest impediment, however, is in cultivating the mindset shift that is needed to move to it as a way of working. This requires buy-in from the very top of the organisation.
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