There are a lot of things that make a modern tech oriented company successful. Product-Market fit, scoping and planning, adequate resource allocation, and so much more. Digging a bit deeper, when it comes to engineering success, one aspect always stands above the rest. Culture!
In engineering first companies, it’s pretty easy to identify the need and push the changes need to get the engineers in sync. However, for those that aren’t in companies solely found in the tech sector, establishing this is difficult. That is why we’ll be going over some good tips to help instill that in these environments.
Establish Footing In The Organization
The biggest hurdle for most in this position is getting appropriate buy-in from outside engineering. It’s pretty easy to assume that in the internet/tech-focused world we live in, everyone understands the importance of engineering. Unfortunately, that’s a big no. Most people genuinely don’t think beyond their personal use of tech as platforms and hardware. Let alone take the time to consider the intricate complexities it takes to build and maintain.
I highlight this because most people miss this aspect. Taking a pragmatic and analytical approach, any engineer would just assume we’d only need to ship quality consistently. That may be a part, but it’s not the whole script. Getting proper support and buy-in also includes expanding others’ perspectives and communicating importance effectively.
Keep As Much IP Internal As Possible
Development velocity is going to require some combination of contractor, offshore, and/or nearshore resources. While this is all well, it’s important to draw a line on what defines what your team needs to take on internally. When non internal teammebers take on core development tasks, it establishes a few precedents. False perception of development lifecycle and proper feature set negotiating the main two that come to mind for me.
Build In The Open
It’s easy to get so caught up in our world, we forget the anxiety the building process has for non-engineers. Unlike us, they can’t just look at Git commit history and get an understanding. Even more, most Kanban boards are hardly ever well written and updated well enough to give proper visibility. So from there side, they have no idea where things are.
In my experience, this can easily be resolved by establishing an up-to-date preview/stagging enviornment. This should never be expected to be perfect, but it should be up to date with the latest code getting ready to be deployed to production.
In Closing
Establishing engineering culture is iterative. There is no one thing that can be done that’ll take you from 0 to 100. However, there are steps you can make to highlight your teams capabilities and establishing trust from parterns outside of engineering. So take these tips as a starting point, and go build your culture!