The ins and outs of a strong engineering culture with tb.lx
Off the back of our most recent MeetUp, we are here getting granular about how to implement and maintain an intentional, strong Engineering Culture.
Getting started — why are we here?
Having a strong, stand-out company culture is a goal that all companies are expected to fulfill with ease, and something that all job seekers expect from a potential employer in today’s job market. But what goes into creating a solid culture that employees will actually enjoy, identify with, and advocate for beyond the workplace? Do these expectations differ across industries? We’re glad you asked, let’s discuss!
From our point of view, building an intentional culture, starts with answering the question, “what’s the character you want your company to have”? In our case, we focused on our core values of having a challenger mindset, a hunger for impact, collaboration, sustainability, people-centricity, flexibility, transparency, and trust, and implementing these visibly across the organization. We took a particular focus on our values and how they can be applied specifically to our engineering teams, to facilitate a working environment that is efficient, empowering, allows for learning, growth, and development, and minimizes micro-management for our Engineering Managers.
To create such an environment, our Engineering Management Team, focuses daily on promoting the cultural pillars of people-centricity, continuous improvement, effective communication, and getting things done within their teams. Curious about what they’ve learned? Read on to experience our interviews with Andrei Straut, and Pedro Serra, 2/3 of our Engineering Management Team here at tb.lx!
Looking at Engineering Culture from Andrei Straut’s perspective
Andrei is our Engineering Manager responsible for our Connectivity teams. He has 14+ years of experience in software engineering, and has worked in three different countries, with projects and work spanning multiple industries. What is his take on leadership and how to drive autonomous, efficient teams? Dig in and find out!
1. If you had to summarize what an engineering culture actually is in a couple of lines, how would you define it?
AS: An engineering culture is the sum of multiple things that all come together to create a company. On the concrete and quantifiable side there are processes, regulations, guidelines, metrics, and company values that define how things should work. On the abstract side, you have the attitudes and behaviors that are encouraged (or prohibited), and the atmosphere you want your company to have. These things then come together to create a “character” that your company has, which is actually the culture.
Let’s look at what this looks like in practice. When we say that company has, for example, a performance-driven engineering culture, it usually means that they are hyper-focused on measuring every relevant performance indicator (SLIs — like page load times, or customer journey, or revenue per customer) and optimizing for those above all else.
2. Which of the cultural pillars (people-centricity, continuous improvement, effective communication, getting things done) comes most naturally to you as a leader? Is there one that challenges you most?
AS: For me personally, people-centricity and effective communication are the things I tend to focus on most. I believe that the job of a leader at any level is to create teams that work well together, to do whatever job they need to do.
It always takes a village, and no-one can do everything on their own. So, if I have a group of people, I know are great at their jobs, my focus is on making sure they work together effectively, trust each other, complement their strengths and weaknesses, and communicate openly and efficiently.
This tends to multiply and turn into something that is more than just the sum of their constituents, and it becomes more like a well-oiled machine that instinctively knows what to do in any situation.
3. How do you promote continuous improvement in your teams? What advice would you give engineers, looking to push the boundaries on their work and to fuel growth?
AS: I strongly encourage it, stopping just short of forcing it :). As in all industries and professions, engineering is also a mix of people that drive their own growth in a structured and organized way, with specific goals, as well as people who like to see their growth happen more naturally, rather than in a strict way.
Couple that, with the fact that software engineering is a massive field, where things change and improve and new frameworks or methodologies pop up every other week, and it means that everyone, without exception, always has new things to learn.
Which is how I try to encourage continuous improvement; in a way that is clear and measurable for everyone. I focus a lot on Growth Plans for the teams I work with, regardless of how good their performance was (or is), and we work together to find the next thing they should focus their learning efforts on.
For the engineers trying to push the boundaries of their work — something I have learned from experience, is that the difference between good and great engineers is in the hard skills they possess (specifically, software engineering itself). I also believe that the difference between great and amazing engineers, comes down to their soft skills (communication, being able to drive their point forward without being a jerk, transparency and accountability, and teamwork). Being an amazing engineer is more than knowing the latest and greatest language or framework (although that for sure helps); it’s also about being able to bring others to your side to work together with you on building amazing things.
4. How does tb.lx support sustainable growth within its teams? What does sustainable growth mean to you?
AS: We take the culture pillars we talked about seriously. Giving space and opportunities to our tblxers (people-centricity), saying what we mean and meaning what we say (effective communication), measuring and improving what we do and who we are (continuous improvement), and focusing on the bigger picture (get stuff done) means that we have employees that feel safe, heard, on the road to consistent growth, and that feel achieved and fulfilled. This directly helps keep our retention and satisfaction numbers above average market levels, even when things don’t go exactly as planned (because, as all companies, we also sometimes run into blockers). But we wouldn’t have it, any other way.
A Look into Engineering Culture from the perspective of Pedro Serra
Pedro is one of the Engineering Managers dedicated to our e-mobility cluster, supervising a collection of teams working in this area. Pedro has 12+ years of experience as a software engineer, and throughout his professional journey went from working on the backend to the frontend, across multiple industries. Over the years he has had a lot of experience to shape his perspective on what a true engineering culture is — keep reading on to find out how this journey has shaped his views.
1. If you had to summarize what an engineering culture actually is in a couple of lines, how would you define it?
PS: An *engineering culture* is the outcome of a set of shared values, practices and even strategies that end up defining the environment in which engineers contribute to an organization’s goals. It isn’t so much about technical skills, but rather about the approach lived by those departments.
2. Which of the cultural pillars (people-centricity, continuous improvement, effective communication, getting things done) comes most naturally to you as a leader? Is there one that challenges you most?
PS: To me, the most natural pillars are people-centricity and continuous improvement. I’m the most influenced by strategies that focus on the balance of short-term dynamic evaluation and change that becomes intuitive for medium to long term progress and benefit for the teams. It ends up requiring a good measure of people centricity (understanding how work is perceived and dealt with), and without this organizations fail, or become slow and ineffective.
Effective communication applied to an organization might be the most challenging to implement. Communication becomes a muscle that needs constant practice, and people tend to disregard the importance of that outside of their immediate area of operation.
3. How do you promote continuous improvement in your teams? What advice would you give engineers, looking to push the boundaries on their work and to fuel growth?
PS: Continuous improvement is the most effective when done in short, steady bursts that are spread out in time and have sufficient focus to be done right. To illustrate this, I usually use the expression “growth is a marathon, not a sprint”. This means that we need to be ready to consistently invest in learning, growing, and improving over long periods of time, even making this a habit. Habits become culture and that outlives any short-term strategy we might try to implement.
Once the baseline has been set, we need to understand where and what to improve. The way to do this is through measurement (quantitative evaluation) and feedback (qualitative evaluation).
My advice to any engineer out there is to invest into two qualities: patience and consistency. Come to love the process of improving, not just the finish line.
4. What advice would you give to those just starting out on their leadership journeys? What has been the biggest learning on your own journey so far?
PS: It’s quite easy to become focused on becoming a strong technical leader but be reminded that in any leadership position it’s the soft-skills that have the most impact. The ability to have empathy for another colleague and understand how they can be at their best, to actively listen and to communicate effectively, become the biggest strengths of any leader.
My biggest learning of my own journey is to understand the immeasurable value of a cohesive team, no matter the size, the role, or the level. Create smaller teams wherever you go and focus on strong assertive relationships. Align expectations often and build trust.
5. How does tb.lx support sustainable growth within its teams? What does sustainable growth mean to you?
PS: Sustainable Growth at tb.lx comes from the people centric approach, of focusing on individual wellbeing as a means to foster strong performance. Just like athletes, our colleagues need the right conditions to thrive. Not only that, but they also need information and feedback to know how and where to improve. And just on this answer, you can already feel some of our cultural pillars.
Sustainable Growth is for me the ability to continuously look for improvement opportunities at all levels while understanding the limits of what is achievable in a certain period of time. At the same time, accept that failure is part of the process and learn to pivot and change quickly.
When it all comes down to it, what really impacts culture?
One of the most important lessons we have learned as a company over the years is that managing people, and their growth must be sustainable. This means two key things; being intentional with how you build a company culture to last (preferably slow, and adapted to ongoing key learnings you uncover), as well as retaining top talent, in a competitive market and industry (it goes beyond just salary and perks).
What does it all mean? From our perspective (and as worded by Pedro and Andrei during our last MeetUp) it is about:
- Finding out what matters to your employees and using it as their motivator;
- Balancing how much weight the company places on encouraging certain behaviors across the board and bringing in employees’ actual behavior, company-wide;
- Operating on assumption-based improvements — wanting to evolve and progress because we think intentional change is good, and we enjoy the growth journey and challenging our boundaries;
- Ensuring that the balance of work assigned to each employee is “just right” for them and their reality — and not setting hard limits on what too much actually is.
At any rate, the one key idea of this whole discussion is people and understanding what makes them tick. Communicating with them transparently, being open, honest, and valuing their maturity and experience, is a good place to start. The rest (an intentional, strong engineering culture) will follow in time.
This interview was conducted by our Employer Branding, Internal Communications, and PR Expert, Andrea Leiras, with our Engineering Managers Andrei Straut and Pedro Serra. 🚛🌿
