7 keys to a happier digital maker

In today's global economy, where companies have geographically dispersed, 'round the clock', teams - the pursuit of efficiency has resulted in an aggressive focus on indicators such as cycle time, capacity utilization, velocity and quality. These are what I would call ‘lagging’ indicators in that they are symptoms or byproducts of underlying issues, and putting effort into fixing them through better management practices, process optimization, new tools, automation and so forth, will yield results that may move the needle in the short term (i.e., band-aid ) - but the question is how to sustain it?

Let's start by looking at the people - the raw materials - and fundamentally create situational awareness around how they are doing. Through my research, conversations with multiple leaders and individual contributors over the last decade as part of my entrepreneurial journey, advising multiple startups and consulting to enterprises, I would suggest the following areas which leaders, managers and teams should actively track and address head on ...

1. Excessive Backlog

Seldom is there any vision and definable method of prioritization - ending up in vague requirements, causing all sorts of tension and frustration. Giant backlogs, often with outdated items surfaced up during sprint planning session is a sure way to demoralize a developer and when it comes to adding new ideas forget about it. I’ve been in many meetings where amazing ideas are added to the backlog, maybe even drafted up on a doc, but never see the light of day because grooming a backlog is arduous.

Before you know it, a new product manager enters, engineers get recycled onto other initiatives, and that backlog is a weight on everyone’s backs - more often than not leading to burnout. As result we go back to square one - clear the backlog - and we rinse and repeat.?Sometimes teams will invest into Product Mgmt. tools to clean up the mess on an ongoing basis, or define backlog grooming days. Successful product managers are always watching their backlog and prioritizing what is important to the custom. I highly recommend you read 'flow' - principles of product development!

2. Knowledge Gaps

According to a comprehensive study ( “Understanding the knowledge gaps of software engineers”) by Queen’s University in Belfast, there is a unanimously clear perceived knowledge gap between what a job requires and academic training – leaving a gaping hole needing to be filled by tacit knowledge transfer and on-the-job training. You can refer to this graph below where basically anything below the line signifies a knowledge gap ...

Questions remain around the top down driven strategies to bridge these gaps through different interventions?(training, developmental, and organizational, etc.) – and thank God for StackOverflow which is a developer's best friend and mentor, guru and trainer. Facebook’s well documented practice, especially from it’s early days, of immersive training programs and rotations where new hires were thrown into the deep end and shipping production code is certainly one way to short circuit the onboarding process, while assigning buddies and setting up shadow opportunities on some segment of the code base is another common practice in the Silicon Valley.

3. Communications Silos

While the benefits of agile, modular and distributed, '2 pizza' teams , in context of loosely coupled system architectures and microservices, are well known, the risks are not as much talked about - especially with large organizations or geographically dispersed teams - resulting in dysfunctional engineering systems and non-communicative teams.

Alex 'Sandy' Pentland and team from MIT Media Lab came out with a study that explored how just by simply focussing on improving specific collaboration patterns amongst teams and assessing the heath of three key indicators, energy ( volume ), engagement (distribution within a team ) and exploration (distribution across teams), an organization can set itself up for success.

If not check, tribal knowledge will emerge - and this is one of the biggest enemies of flourishing organizations. Great CEOs, and leaders, practice transparency. For example, Bipul Sinha is very open about communication to the rest of the employees, sharing information verbatim from board meetings, including the good and the bad while Reed Hastings always ensured that all employees, at every level of the hierarchy, would have direct visibility and understanding of the business challenges facing the company. This feeling of being included, through radical transparency, gives a feeling of inclusiveness and ‘all-in’ – yielding top results.

On a related note, from a pure system technology perspective, it is key to put effort into reducing swivel chair issues where a dozen systems are a composite system of record of the latest information at any given time. This means that if any information was required, it would be a challenge to gain insight into it – this is an under-estimated, often overlooked phenomena – and a fundamental reason for disjointed organizations. By having an aggregation tool, that connects and unites across silos, and brings everything together, organizations would more easily develop knowledge ‘flows’ by default.

4. Trust

Studies have shown that one of the primary sources of workplace stresses aren’t what one may immediately assume (e.g., long hours, over exertion etc.) – but actually the inability to feel ‘empowered’ without being micro-managed all the time.

There was a ‘stress’ study done on multiple packs of baboons in Africa, and they found that the most stressed out males - evidenced by hair loss, less muscle, timid body language, last to eat, no allowance to be with females - feared the wrath of the alpha and always were in his shadow, with little to no freedom or agency. Humans are indeed cut from the same cloth - hence the thinking that, ‘people don’t leave the company, but they leave their bosses’.

Google’s Aristotle study disclosed how ‘psychological safety’ was a consistent characteristic of high performing teams. The allowance to feel ‘safe’ is a powerful enabler of tinkering, innovation and allowing employees to be their best selves – all of course within constraints set by leadership. For example, certain desired outcomes can be specified, and as long as they are within the ethical, financial, technical and functional boundaries– how one goes about it, is up to them – they have agency. That is the essence of good leadership.?

5. Knowing the ‘Why'

This is a true story, back in 2014 - at a MuleSoft all-hands meeting, a Sales leader - I think it was Terry Tripp - asked a question of the CEO, Greg Schott , ‘what would you change about the company?’ – and Greg’s response was, “Engineers – just build, do not wait to be told!”.

The morale of this story is central to the Product Led Growth motion where the dis-intermediation of layers between the builders ( i.e., engineers, developers etc.) and the end user/customer is key. The introduction of new tooling such as DevRev , co-founded by Dheeraj Pandey and Manoj Agarwal , are solving this very issue!

The positive impact of this is an empowerment and confidence that gets instilled into the engineers – the fact that they know why they exist in the company - and can directly correlate their work products to business goals and customer satisfaction is so refreshing!

6. Hero Culture

Within every organization there typically lies a set of highly specialized tasks, or stocks of tacit knowledge - unwritten and typically shared by word-of-mouth (if at all) - or a specific set of features or portion of code that hasn’t been documented well. These are most commonly found in legacy systems, or after an M&A – when the acquired company hasn’t been integrated properly, or due to poor corporate governance practices and lack of standardization, or incoherent planning and disjointed data and business operations.

This naturally leads to a phenomena called hero culture – where some individuals or groups are perceived to be heroically ‘saving the day’ by fixing issues and bugs, conducting activities, short circuiting a process, in a manner that is highly efficient.

When it gets especially negative is when these people avoid documenting it, and keep information to themselves and even worse, they will go the extra mile, be dedicated, intelligent, knowledgeable and hard-working and become indispensable. Managers must watch out for this as this behavior will impact the ability to scale, and ultimately affect morale and ability to sustain a long term operation effectively.

7. Bureaucracy

The inevitabilities of digital work often entail repetitive manual tasks such as status updates, reports, data collection/entry, along with productivity-killers such as frequent emails, IMs, meetings, lengthy ticket approval / sign-off / confirmation during processes – which in a single word can be summed up as ‘bureaucracy’.

This is not to suggest ALL the aforementioned are wasteful activities, but ask any worker and they will tell you how productivity gets sucked as a result of getting stuck in the bureaucracy vortex.

The solve here is to first identify as many opportunities for automation as much as possible, from customer service Chatbots to process automation and everything in between, to instituting cultural norms to encourage focus times. This is the reason why many Silicon Valley companies have instituted ‘no meeting’ days, or why many engineering teams set norms around IM, and deliberate collaboration expectations on response times, and so forth.

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Now that you have read through all seven points, I would urge you to also apply them in geographical context. For example, the need for ensuring psychological safety in the US - if applied in an Indian context may result in a manager perceived to be uncertain, or unsure. Also, the threshold of burnout in the US may be different than in India. Management methods are distinctly different so there is no one size fits all, however I do believe that this will apply a bit more to the younger generations that are coming up now in India and other such countries.