Building A Healthy Engineering Organization

4 min readApr 3, 2018

This is Part 1 in a series on building a healthy engineering organization. We’re more than developers writing code, we’re humans solving problems together.

Part 1: Why is a Healthy Engineering Culture Important?

Part 2: Foundations Of A Healthy Engineering Team

Part 3: Improving The Interview Process

Part 4: Fostering and Maintaining Your Culture

Part 5: Diversity of Thought

What’s great about building a healthy engineering culture, is that it pays back real dollars over time, allowing you to focus on your actual customers, while also growing your people.

When talking about what a healthy engineering culture looks like, not enough attention is paid to the core of what that means. By now, we know that it’s more than free beer and a ball pit room. But what does a truly sustainable, healthy engineering culture look like? How do you create one that developers want to work in that kicks out working software to serve your customers?

Let’s dive into a few key components that any team can start implementing today, with or without capital. Most of these team fundamentals only costs your (valuable) time but what’s great about building a healthy engineering culture is that it pays back real dollars over time, allowing you to focus on your actual customers, while also growing your people. Invest this time today, and you’ll never look back.

Why Is A Healthy Engineering Culture Important?

It is mostly common knowledge that a happy, inspired employee creates better work — whatever the team, product or industry. Of course it makes sense. But did you know that it’s up to the organization, not the individual, to bring that to the table? Hiring smart, intelligent people is not enough. In his book, The Advantage, on creating healthy organizations, Patrick Lencioni puts it best: “The health of an organization is a multiplier of its intelligence.” If every team is hiring smart people, how do some teams execute better than others? Here’s how — Creating a healthy engineering organization multiples the intelligence of all of the great engineers you’ve hired.

Effects on Productivity

A recent Bain study looked into the impact of employees who are merely satisfied with their jobs vs those who are inspired by their jobs. Through surveys and research of hundreds of companies they worked with, they found that an inspired employee is about 2.25x as productive as a merely satisfied employee. They are also more likely to deliver quality work consistently.

In my entire career of working with tech teams, I’ve heard a version of the same question from every company: “How can we get more tech delivered?”. I’ve seen The Social Network in which Mark Zuckerberg hosted an all night booze infested hack-a-thon to find the best hacker. I’ve heard about 10x engineers, and for a reason I don’t understand, ninja and rockstar developers. The answer is actually much simpler than that, and I hope to prove it.

A Quick Note On Ethics

Given today’s cultural environment, we have to also talk about the effect that our tech can have on the end customer. Ethical technology is certainly a larger topic to discuss, but at minimum it’s important to recognize that only teams or organizations born out of a healthy culture can understand how to best make decisions, including ethical decisions. In a toxic environment it is easy miss the warning signs of how a technology may negatively impact your customer. In an organization where there is healthy conflict and debate — and where psychological safety is honored, better decisions can be made.

Areas Of Consideration

In this series, I’ll share the central themes to developing a strong engineering organization. These are building blocks that go all the way down to the emotional and human level. At the end of the day, we’re a group of imperfect humans working together to build products that our customers want to use.

In my experience, focusing on these foundations makes it much easier when the difficult product decisions come: when your product team disagrees on the next big feature, when your company is constrained by funding and must make trade offs, or simply that day to day decision of shipping code.

So what is the first step? Next in the series, creating the foundational elements that drive your team.