Building High-Performance Teams: Strategies for Modern Software Engineers
Your first thought coming here might be something like:
“What? How can I improve the performance of my team? I am just a member of the team. It is my manager's job to improve the overall performance…”
But it turns out that as a software engineer, you’re more than just a code monkey. The efficiency, effectiveness, and performance of your team don’t just depend on how well each person on the team writes code. It also depends on how well you all work together. In this guide, we will explore strategies for what you, as a software engineer, can do to enhance your team’s performance.
This article is the first of a two-part series. In the second series, my colleague Jakob Mayr is exploring strategies for how you can improve team performance as an Engineering Manager and Leader. (It is still in writing, but I will link it, once it’s finished)
When it comes to measuring performance, teams matter more than individuals — Manuel Pais & Matthew Skelton
Embrace Agile Methodologies
Agile methodologies, such as Scrum or Kanban, are not just management trends. They are frameworks designed to enhance team productivity and adaptability. As an engineer, embracing these methodologies means more than just attending daily stand-ups. It involves:
- Active Participation in Planning: Voice your opinions on what’s feasible within a sprint. Your insights are crucial for setting realistic goals.
- Taking Ownership: In Agile, not every task needs the OK of a Manager. Take ownership of your tasks and be proactive in updating their status.
- Being Flexible: A big part of Agile is adaptability. Be open to changes as projects evolve. (This is also at the heart of our company philosophy at Comsysto Reply, where we formulated this as “Sense & Respond”)
A lot of this also ties into basic things such as having a team-first mindset as described in the book Team Topologies by Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais. They suggest that you should:
Arrive for stand-ups and meetings on time
It sounds so simple, right? But I think that arriving at meetings on time goes a long way. It shows that you value other people’s time and respect them.
Keep discussions and investigations on track
At Comsysto Reply, we advocate for active participation where every team member has the responsibility to steer the conversation back to the main points if it starts to deviate. Having a dedicated moderator also helps, reminding the team of time boxes and ensuring that each topic receives the attention it needs without compromising productivity.
Encourage a focus on team goals
A high-performance team aligns its efforts with shared goals and objectives. To build this alignment, we regularly define and revisit our team’s goals ensuring that they are understood and embraced by all members.
Help unblock other team members instead of starting on new work
You should always consider offering your assistance to colleagues who are stuck before jumping into a new task. By helping to unblock others, you reinforce a culture of support and ensure that the team’s momentum is maintained. Be proactive and ask your team members how you can help them. This will make your team deliver value faster, and a nice side-effect is that this also strengthens the bonds with your colleagues.
Mentor new or less experienced team members
You should take the time to mentor new or less experienced team members. This action is a cornerstone of our collective learning environment at Comsysto Reply. Initiating pair programming sessions, scheduling regular check-ins, or just being available to answer questions can make a significant difference. Mentorship is a powerful tool that benefits everyone involved — mentees gain confidence and skills, while mentors reinforce their expertise and develop leadership qualities.
Avoid winning arguments and, instead, agree to explore options
After all, you don’t want to win an argument if it means putting everyone down. Also most likely you don’t have the full picture of the system or product, so your team members can offer valuable insights. More often than not, the best solution emerges when we embrace our diverse backgrounds and find a middle ground among all ideas.
As you embrace agile methodologies in your software engineering journey, you’ll discover the potent impact of eliminating obstacles. You should actively engage in identifying and removing impediments, whether it’s through the Scrum Master’s role or by direct team collaboration.
Trust as a foundational element: You should know that trust is the bedrock of any high-performing team. When team members do not feel trusted, their desire to collaborate diminishes. Strive to build trust within your team by being open, transparent, and supportive.
Cultivate a Culture of Continuous Learning
As software engineers, we must constantly learn new stuff. The world is changing fast and the tech world is changing even faster. To stay relevant you need to continuously evolve your skills. The wave of change that GenAI is bringing is just getting started. (Proud that I managed to mention GenAI in this post 💪)
Yet, dedicating time to learning sounds great in theory, but how about in practice? It can sometimes be difficult to make time for learning. One of the strategies I use is to incorporate learning into my daily routine. Carve out a slot in your day — whether it’s a deep dive into a new programming paradigm, a quick round on a coding challenge, exploring the latest tech trends, reading some blog post on medium, or reading a page in a book. It doesn’t have to be time-consuming: consistent, bite-sized learning sessions can lead to substantial expertise over time.
“But how do I know what to learn?”, you might ask now. That’s where the invaluable habit of questioning comes into play. Pose questions to your peers and don’t shy away from asking again for clarity or a deeper understanding — each question is a stepping stone towards broader knowledge. Challenging assumptions and seeking answers from experienced colleagues and seniors also helps. Engaging in dialogue about architecture decisions or best practices doesn’t just answer your immediate questions, it also strengthens team cohesion and leads to a shared understanding.
Ask questions. Lot’s of them.
An effective way to learn within the team is through Pair or Mob Programming. These practices aren’t just about writing code together, they’re methods for knowledge exchange, mentorship, and collaborative problem-solving. As you navigate a tough problem with your teammates, you’ll find that the shared experience is perfect for growing new skills. (Also you get to know people way better on a personal level during these sessions.)
Learning isn’t only a personal endeavor, it’s a team sport. At Comsysto Reply, we noticed that the performance of our teams increases rapidly when each team member dedicates time to learning. So we embedded it into our culture. With our 20 Lab Days each year, every colleague gets the space to grow. These Lab Days are our canvas for creativity and learning, fully supported and encouraged by the company. This is also what enables us to stay at the forefront of innovation and what might play into new strategic offerings or help with winning new clients.
Encourage Clear and Open Communication
Transparency is what makes collaboration work inside a team. When we, as team members, pull back the curtains on our personal experiences — sharing anecdotes from our weekends or stories from our private lives — we create stronger, more trusting bonds for our professional interactions.
Aristotle once said, “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts,” and nowhere is this truer than within a well-functioning team. This synergistic effect, where 1 + 1 equals 3, arises when individuals openly communicate, share ideas, and collectively work towards a unified purpose.
To reach this level of synergy, all team members must be aligned on a common goal. Clarity of purpose is the compass that guides each decision, conversation, and code commit. It ensures that every task undertaken is a step toward that shared objective. If you find yourself confused with unclear goals, be proactive. Challenge the status quo by asking for direction, and if you have the freedom, set the course for your team. After all, clear goals and open communication are not just the responsibility of the team leader, they are what every software engineer should be ready to take up.
By embracing transparency, purpose, and open communication, we set the stage for a team that’s more than just a group of individuals. It becomes a community that thrives on mutual respect, and understanding, and collectively achieves success based on common goals.
Collaborate, Don’t Just Coexist
Who is on the team matters less than team dynamics — Manuel Pais & Matthew Skelton
Collaboration in our digital world has changed the way software engineering teams operate. Especially in remote settings, there’s a fine line between just coexisting and truly collaborating. In the virtual workspace of instant messaging, and video calls, we may easily fall into the trap of independent silos inside a team.
Once again the practices of Pair and Mob Programming take on an even greater significance when team members are not sitting in the same office. They enable knowledge-sharing and collective problem-solving. But they also create a sense of unity and team spirit that is usually weaker in remote settings.
Indeed, I share the opinion that nothing beats the energy of co-located teams. The unexpected exchanges by the coffee machine, and the spontaneous “desk drive-bys” provide the perfect ground for creativity and innovation that’s hard to replicate online. However, the reality of our global and flexible work environment often requires us to adapt and find new ways to maintain this closeness even when we are apart. Here are the insights from Christian, our Managing Partner at Comsysto Reply, on balancing office presence with remote work:
For these remote settings, using the right tools is of great importance. Tools that enable us to share our screens, manage our source code, track our tasks, and communicate asynchronously are indispensable. At Comsysto Reply we don’t use anything revolutionary. Microsoft Teams, Zoom, Slack, and Trello do the trick most of the time. One cool tool that I want to mention however is Gather. It tries to replicate a real-life office environment in a pixel art game mode. So in this virtual environment, you can just walk over to your colleague and a video call is automatically started.
Collaboration in a remote setting should be as intentional and robust as it is in a physical office. Remember, technology is the enabler, but the heartbeat of collaboration is the team’s commitment to each other’s success.
Optimize the Developer Experience
Improving the developer experience is about making things easier for your team, and clearing obstacles that slow down the creative process. Think about the manual tasks that everyone finds annoying. These are prime candidates for automation. By taking the time to automate these tasks, you free up valuable time for yourself and your colleagues and also reduce the risk of human error.
Automate the boring stuff
Ask yourself if there are ways to speed up the pipeline runs to deliver faster feedback. Are there strategies you can employ to accelerate the tests or the build process? Faster feedback loops mean issues are addressed promptly, ensuring the team can move forward without unnecessary delays.
Refactoring code is another area where you can significantly improve the daily life of your team members. Diving into the codebase and cleaning it up makes it more enjoyable to work with and also more accessible for new developers joining your team. Consider breaking down large functions, renaming variables & functions to make their purpose clearer, and simplifying complex expressions.
Lastly, think about the last time you wished the documentation was better. Good documentation makes solving common challenges much easier when working with complex systems. By dedicating time to either author or refine documentation, you provide clarity for your team — making it easier for everyone to understand how to use systems and why certain decisions were made.
When you take these steps to optimize the developer experience, you’re showing that you care about your team’s time and well-being. This makes for a more engaged and satisfied team, and that is priceless.
Focus on Quality, Not Just Quantity
It’s essential to remember that the quality of your work profoundly impacts the value you provide. You should aim to create a cult around quality, ensuring that excellence becomes a core aspect of your team's identity. You should always prioritize producing high-caliber code over churning out features hastily, as the latter can lead to technical debt and hinder the product’s long-term success.
At Comsysto Reply, we advocate for incorporating quality assurance practices throughout the development process. You should write clean, maintainable code and embrace test-driven development (TDD) to catch issues early on. Pair programming can also be a valuable technique, allowing you to collaborate with peers for immediate feedback and a shared understanding of the codebase.
Invest time in code reviews with your team to ensure every line of code adheres to agreed standards and best practices. You should view code reviews not as a hurdle but as an opportunity to learn from each other and improve the overall quality of your work.
Additionally, resist the temptation to equate long hours with productivity. It’s about smart work, not hard work. You should strive to stay fresh and avoid burnout, as mental exhaustion can compromise your work’s quality. Remember, the goal is to build software that meets the client’s needs and also stands the test of time by staying flexible enough to evolve with future requirements.
Another important point is taking pride in your work. Sounds simple. But this leads to improved quality. Feeling pride in quality makes you work harder to maintain and improve it. Besides, you will also develop a profound sense of accomplishment and satisfaction in your team. Which is in itself positive to have and can be achieved by celebrating even small wins. Quality should be the signature of your work as a software engineer and craftsman.
Work-Life Balance
In my team during my very first project, we did something called Fika — a Swedish tradition of pausing during the day to enjoy a cup of coffee and a bite of something sweet to eat while socializing.
The major problems of our work are not so much technological as sociological in nature. — Tom DeMarco & Timothy Lister
We did this every Wednesday afternoon, setting aside time specifically to relax and engage in activities completely unrelated to work. Most times that meant sharing stories over coffee, challenging each other to a game of foosball, or teaming up for online games like Exploder. It always cleared our minds and allowed us to restart fresh.
Beyond these weekly pauses, going out for a beer and having dinner together improved our team dynamic. It’s during these moments that you get to know the people you are working with daily— their interests, their families, and where they are coming from. Understanding each other beyond professional life creates a supportive and friendly atmosphere.
But also remember, that you have a life outside of work. It’s important to set boundaries and ensure that your job does not consume all of your time. Balance is not about perfect division but rather about ensuring that work enhances your life without overpowering it. By maintaining this balance, you improve your own life and also bring new energy and fresh perspectives to your team.
Conclusion
The best success is the one in which there is no evident management, in which the team works as a genial aggregation of peers. The best boss is the one who can manage this over and over again without the team members knowing they’ve been “managed”. — Tom DeMarco & Timothy Lister
Remember that while all the technicalities we just explored are important, it’s the value delivered — the outcome — that ultimately defines the success of a high-performing team. Keep the spotlight on what truly matters: the results. In the end, this is also what propels your career forward.
Comsysto Reply develops sophisticated and innovative software solutions with great passion. We manage projects holistically with full transparency: You get everything from one source. When developing solutions we focus on two phases…
