HealthJoy Engineering Strategy: Part 1

Welcome to HealthJoy’s Engineering Blog, where we explore how our engineering organization furthers our vision of removing the complexity from being healthy and well. We’re kicking off today with a post detailing how our Engineering Purpose guides our work.

Our Purpose

At HealthJoy, our Engineering Purpose is to actively drive our commitment to learning and improving engineering principles and practices to best serve the business’s explicit and implicit needs in the present and the future; in other words, stop responding unconsciously. The engineering team’s mindset propels us toward delivering software for both short-term and long-term success, driving us to make every software delivery and support mechanism a meaningful one.

One of the biggest challenges of HealthJoy engineering is to enable rapid scalability of our engineering org. HealthJoy is a fast-growing SaaS-based startup, and we consider the scalability of our engineering organization to be of paramount importance. The engineering org accomplishes scalability by defining a compelling Purpose, navigating the journey with a Compass (read more below), and cultivating a culture for everyone to do and be their best.

At the heart of our Engineering Purpose is the realization that we can make better trade-offs if we not only understand the stakeholders’ needs but are also driven by our Purpose. In short, we rely on the Engineering Purpose for success.

Our Compass

The Compass guides our engineering team to continually pay attention to the quality of software delivery, support, and future enhancements. We also rely on a prioritized product backlog to steer the team to deliver features in the right order.

The Product Management purpose—discovering and providing the highest business value for the biggest gain-creators and pain-relievers—coexists with the Engineering Purpose. We think of them as two sides of the coin (i.e., the “What” and “How”). Our engineering team strives to provide solutions that exceed our market and business needs for existing and new features. We accomplish this by embracing our company values and inspiring our team members to get the best from the latest software processes and technologies and continually grow as an elite software-delivery team.

We believe that software engineering is much more than coding, as life is much more than breathing. Our Compass points us in the direction of continual growth and helps us collectively navigate through day-to-day decisions and actions.

How we win

Principles

Engineering leadership focuses on outcomes that the business explicitly or implicitly needs from engineering both in the short-term and long-term, empowering the team members to define and drive the actions that contribute to those outcomes. That means focusing on team or global measures rather than individual or local measures,

• ensuring that teams aren’t pitted against one another,
• coaching all team members to improve both delivery throughput and operational stability continually, and
• avoiding a “wall of confusion” in which development throws low-quality code over the wall to operations and operations puts in place painful barriers on the wall to inhibit changes.

Measures

We believe that there is no trade-off between throughput and stability. We understand that elite software-delivery teams are crushing their competition by significantly increasing delivery throughput and decreasing failures that otherwise occur with software solutions changes. Hence, our key measures for software-delivery performance gives equal importance to both throughput and stability, accepting them as a duality of “life” (i.e., software development).

Throughput Measures

• Delivery lead time
• Deployment frequency (per developer)

Stability Measures

• Time to restore service
• Change failure rate

We didn’t build our strategy without inspiration. All levels of our engineering team champion the findings of the Accelerate State of DevOps Report by DevOps Research and Assessment. We also look to the deep-dive guidance in the corresponding book, Accelerate.

In the next post in this series, I’ll outline how we build off our common Engineering Purpose and measures in our Engineering Strategy Playbook, driving how we focus, play together, and empower one another as a team of engineering divisions.