Building Cohesive Engineering Teams
There are a few characteristics that are typical of highly effective engineering teams. These include having a cohesive, tight-knit team culture, the ability to consistently execute well and the ability to handle challenges that come their way.
Building a cohesive, tight-knit engineering team is not merely about assembling a group of skilled individuals; it’s about cultivating an environment where collaboration thrives, and team members feel a deep sense of connection and purpose. While it may be easy to spot such teams in action, defining the exact ingredients that make them cohesive can be a bit more elusive.
Having been a part of a cohesive, cross-functional product team at Thumbtack, here are some observations on how to recognize what makes a cohesive engineering team, and how you can shape such a team through organizational incentives and leadership.
How to spot a cohesive, tight-knit engineering team
If you’re unsure of whether you have a tight-knit, cohesive team or not, you probably don’t. Defining what exactly makes a team that way isn’t always obvious. But in my experience, there’s at least two traits I have found to exist on cohesive teams:
They tend to be highly engaged: Members of cohesive teams not only know how to execute well on initiatives, but also actively participate in the product development process. They ask questions about why we might be prioritizing specific initiatives and speak their mind about why they may not agree with certain decisions. They tend to deeply care about product direction and the impact specific initiatives will have on users. For example, engineers on my team enthusiastically pitched at least 100 product & engineering ideas every planning cycle.
They tend to care about each other: Cohesive teams prioritize the well-being and growth of their fellow team members. They help create an environment where everyone feels supported, both personally and professionally. Examples of this include engineers at all levels proactively volunteering to help review code changes, pointing out when colleagues seem to be stretched and might need support or proactively identifying opportunities to build and share learnings.
What cohesion enables
The cohesiveness of an engineering team unlocks several key benefits. Here are two of the biggest benefits:
Easier collaboration: When team members feel connected to each other, collaboration becomes easier. There’s a willingness to share knowledge, offer assistance, and initiate conversations with the assumption of positive intent. This collaborative spirit accelerates problem-solving and can help greatly improve the execution velocity of a team as a whole.
Alignment is easier: In the blog 8 principles for effectively scaling engineering teams, Lakshmi Baskaran describes designing highly cohesive but loosely coupled teams by having engineers focus on common goals while having clear communication pathways with engineers on other teams. In their view, this enables more autonomous decision making enabling teams to move faster [1]. In my view, cohesive teams tend to be highly engaged around engineering & product direction. If you can convince such teams “why” something needs to happen, they will likely take it upon themselves to figure out “how” to make it happen. They are much more likely to self organize and ensure their initiatives align with the direction being set, thus maximizing productivity.
How cohesion can be nurtured
It’s highly unlikely that you will end up with a cohesive engineering team without deliberate actions that nudge this. Organizational culture and the leadership within a team either help make or break it.
Through organizational incentives: Organizations can incentivize cohesion by fostering a culture that values teamwork and collaboration. This can include recognition programs that celebrate collective achievements and team-building activities that promote bonding. You can also incentivize this as an organization by not just valuing someone’s contributions to their own initiatives, but by valuing their contributions supporting initiatives outside of their own. For example, at Thumbtack collaboration, communication and citizenship are all documented parts of our engineering rubric with clear expectations for engineers across all levels. Thus, folks know that we value this within our engineering culture.
Through leadership: In previous sections, we went over some characteristics that you see on such teams as well as what this enables. Engineering leaders within a team (both individual contributors & managers) play a crucial role in shaping these team dynamics. Here are some of my learnings around this:
1. Demonstrate empathy: As an engineering leader, you help set the tone. If you want your team to care about each other’s growth and well being, you have to demonstrate that care through your actions. If you see someone feeling stretched across multiple initiatives or unsure of how to approach a problem ask if they’d like help. If you’re not actively thinking about how to balance execution rigor vs the well being of your team, you are more likely to have engineers burn out on your team. The more burnouts on a team, the greater likelihood of attrition which is detrimental to team cohesion.
2. Recognize teamwork and collaboration: If you’re a manager, you have tools to recognize examples of great collaboration & teamwork and reinforce the importance of this within your team. You can obviously account for someone’s positive impact as a collaborator on various initiatives through the performance process. But the performance process alone is not enough. When initiatives on the team launch, you can be vocal in recognizing not just the folks driving initiatives, but also those who were involved in helping make it happen.
3. Discuss the why behind company strategy: If you want folks to make decisions that align with broader organization or company strategy, they have to be aware of organizational changes around strategy. The only way to do this is to often communicate the “why” behind decisions being made within the broader organization or company as transparently as possible. The more you communicate decisions being considered or decisions that have been made, the more likely it is that your team will want to engage in decision making.
4. Create forums to share new ideas: Leaders often want highly engaged teams that care about the larger strategy in play. But if you want to enable a culture that promotes engagement around strategy, you have to create forums that facilitate idea & opinion sharing. Quarterly, half-yearly or annual planning on teams often present opportunities around this. You can solicit ideas & feedback from the team at various stages of the planning process while also setting clear expectations around how decisions will be made. For example, on my team, this included having an idea pitch fest each planning cycle where every member of the team gets a chance to pitch their top ideas and vote for the ones they think will make a difference. This was followed by a prioritization session reserved for team leads, which was then followed by a draft share out with the entire team around which ideas we were thinking of pursuing. This forum enabled engineers on the team to share over 100 ideas each planning cycle and engage with the team’s leadership on the product roadmap.
5. Celebrate success while normalizing failure: Shared success & shared failures can bring people closer together. While it’s absolutely essential to share & celebrate team success, how you deal with failure is often what rallies a team together. For example, on my team this meant using experiment failures as an opportunity to talk about any learnings, any infrastructure or process improvements and celebrating people’s efforts around getting those initiatives off the ground.
Building a cohesive engineering team is not a one-time task — it’s an ongoing journey that requires continuous investment and nurturing. I hope some of these ideas above inspire you to think about how to build cohesive engineering teams.
Acknowledgement
Thanks to Kira Shillis for nudging me to share my observations around building cohesive engineering teams. Thanks to Joseph Soltzberg, Nadia Stuart, Cassandra Abernathy for providing helpful suggestions and insights reviewing this blog.
Sources / References
[1] 8 principles for effectively scaling engineering teams by Lakshmi Baskaran
[2] Icons from icon-icons.com
