The 4 elements of a strong engineering culture

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As an engineering lead, it is important to clearly define the attributes that will propel your company forward.

Kultur is the backbone of every engineering team. It's what drives the team forward as a cohesive unit, keeps engineers engaged, and attracts new talent.

There are two closely related aspects to consider when it comes to company culture. On one hand, you have the internal values and external brand of the engineering team. On the other hand, there is the daily process that defines, shapes, and strengthens the engineering culture

1. Execution

One of the most important things for an engineering team is to produce high-quality results - which means that the focus must be on strong performance. Teams should be aligned with their mission and have a clear understanding of long-term roadmap.

This is especially true for fast-paced, rapidly growing startups that are constantly trying new things and evolving. This makes them agile, flexible, and adaptable in their work. They don't always have all the information upfront, so iterations are key. With clear mission statements and long-term roadmaps, teams and engineers can keep their work aligned with the broader team and company mission.

To achieve agility, teams need to focus on the right priorities and make sure they are working on the most impactful projects – the ones that support the company's mission and goals.

It is important to help the team create clear metrics that the organization can focus on. This will ensure that the team's roadmaps are prioritized against these metrics, so that only a few high-impact projects are pursued. Raw project count is not as important as ensuring that teams are executing well and having a big impact on the business.

When it comes to quality, it's more important to focus on the level of quality rather than the quantity. Make sure your teams are spending their time on projects that are most important. This will ensure a higher level of overall quality.

2.Impact

Having a real impact means ensuring that everyone does their work in a way that positively benefits the customer. For this to be successful, engineers need to be empowered and have a sense of responsibility for their work. Successful teams and organizations are closely aligned at all levels - from development and product to design and operations/sales - and have an equal say in decision-making.

Instead of simply taking a product specification and starting as many pull requests as possible, engineers should be more involved in setting the direction for the product. They should also have empathy for their customers and their weaknesses.

There are many ways to achieve customer empathy: regular meetings with your users, understanding their challenges by reading and responding to support reports, reading mood surveys, etc. By taking the time to understand your customers, you will be able to provide them with a better overall experience.

The last point is a metric-based approach to everything. In order to ensure that we are delivering work that positively helps our customers, we need to be able to measure it and use it as input for roadmap prioritization. Projects should be experiments and results should be measurable against clear success criteria. This allows everyone to make informed decisions, to prioritize projects objectively or deprioritize them, to celebrate successes or learn from failures.

Of course, there are exceptions. Some projects are simply ones that you know you have to do and oftentimes a higher risk leads to a higher reward.

3.Teamwork

The culture of an engineering team is ultimately made up of the cultures of many smaller teams. A strong corporate culture requires a strong team culture, where individual members can rely on each other, feel supported, and be vulnerable with one another.

A key part of that is culture. Things can go wrong at some point, but it's important that engineers learn from their mistakes through how they deal with them.

4.Quality

Technical excellence is essential for a company's long-term stability, efficiency, and success. This often refers to high-quality code, but there are many cases where work needs to be delivered quickly. That's perfectly acceptable - as long as it's the exception and not the rule

One way for engineering leaders to demonstrate their focus on quality is through their investments - for example, in employee count, infrastructure, and platform teams. If quality is truly important to you, then you need to take action. The true focus of these teams should be on technical excellence and improving the rest of the engineering team through constant improvements, automation, and technical leadership.

As an engineering leader, it is important to clearly define the attributes that will move your company forward.