Your Organisational Performance Could Only Be as Good as Your Engineering Culture

Photo by Bill Oxford on Unsplash

Many believe that every business today is a software business — either delivering software products or powered by one. One of the very essential groups of people central to any conversation about software products is the Software Engineering Team — for software does not build itself, people do. We know that the quality of a software product both reflects the quality of the engineering team behind the software and is a good proxy for an organisation’s performance. But in this piece, we’ll see how software engineering teams themselves impact this performance — productivity, market share, and profitability.

Before we go on, let’s make a very important clarification:

Software is, of course, a very complex and sophisticated entity. It’s by no means entirely the output of just the engineering team implementing it — the entire organisation is involved, in many different ways, in the production of software. And the organisation is as good as all its constituent teams.

Akin to academia’s “publish or perish”, but without any perceived or real toxic pressure, is the “innovate or die” aphorism — which software circles are very familiar with.
What does it mean — innovate or die?
Well, see Blockbuster, for one of many examples of the high price businesses pay when they…