How to boost engineer motivation by focusing on alignment

The magic of engineering alignment, or should I say the doom of misalignment.

I’ve seen great engineering teams crash and burn when their mechanisms of alignment start to fail. From lack of engineer motivation to engineering slowness to stakeholder frustration. It typically leads back to small misalignments that build over time.

Objective data can help with this — but it must be at the core of the entire team, and used to communicate with other stakeholders. It must not replace conversations and should facilitate learning over-evaluation — or it will create more misalignments.

What causes misalignments?

• Lack of understanding of what your team really needs
• Lack of visibility into the work and where your disruptions are
• Making too many decisions off intuition or “past experience”
• Lack of self-accountability and blame-shifting

These are just a few to think about, but they’re ones worth taking a look at to see if they plague you as a manager or your engineering team.

Some say this is what daily stand-ups, 1:1s, and retrospectives are for — but sometimes those are performative and ineffective.

If you feel like your team is not humming like you want it to, it could be one or a string of misalignments.

Get clear on where they are, own it as a manager, work to align your team, work to align stakeholders — and watch engineer motivation skyrocket.

This is part of the reason why I’m so excited to be building Staat, our goal is to help managers become more data-driven with their teams to help them stay aligned. A tool we built with learning over evaluation at the heart.

We’ve got a growing collective of 200+ managers looking to boost visibility and introduce data with their teams, and would love for you to test it out with them! Feel free to sign up and try for free at: www.staat.co