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Matt Swann is the former CTO of Nubank and has served various senior product roles for disruptive global companies like Booking and Amazon.
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I have had this conversation many times. The leader of a team or organization who is opposed to enforcing accountability measures for productivity says they don’t understand the rationale for greater oversight. When asked about their objection, they say teams don’t want to be micromanaged and told what to do. Yet those same teams participated in piloting the new productivity tools and found them valuable.
Contrary to the idea of resistance coming only from teams, it is typically leadership that fails when attempting to transform a culture with a top-down, bottom-up approach. Without leading by example and using the right language to communicate the value of accountability, companies will continue to struggle for greater productivity.
Convincing people of the value of measuring and inspecting requires direction and support from leadership rather than heavy-handed oversight. It means making efficiency and productivity central to the way people in the organization work. When productivity is core to the operating model, efficiency measures are never seen as an imposition. This is even more important in the technology industry.
Efficiency Is Not Seasonal
When advised on how to improve productivity and efficiency, leaders are usually told to build reports, focus on metrics and apply the efficiency tools of Six Sigma. While that guidance is correct, it misses the real block. Top-down direction sets the tone and voice around the prioritization of efficiency—and everyone in the company understands that productivity is going to be measured and continuously improved. However, if leaders only take a top-down approach, productivity can fall in and out of favor.
It is often said that revenue washes away many sins, and we have witnessed that productivity tends to matter less during good times. Amid the hyper-growth of the last several years, many companies frantically hired more people without focusing on efficiency and productivity. Then, when there was a shift in the market, the call suddenly went out for personnel and cost cuts.
Efficiency and productivity are not seasonal. Setting productivity goals allows companies to increase their engineering capacity to do more with the same resources—so much so that many of last year’s mass layoffs could have been avoided if there hadn’t been such a hiring frenzy in the first place.
The main lesson is that building a culture is a transformation and journey. Periods of hyper-growth are actually the best time to ingrain productivity so that when the pendulum swings back to optimization mode, companies don’t have drastic measures forced upon them.
Build Champions And Owners
The first step when embedding efficiency and productivity into the culture is understanding what to measure, honing the metrics and working out how to improve them. Once the inspection mechanisms are created, the job of leadership is to enforce accountability.
There are many tools to help gain better visibility into what drives productivity in terms of software and product development. CI/CD allows developers to streamline and automate their processes through continuous pipeline integration and delivery. Without it, businesses can have code sitting around for weeks, waiting to see a customer.
Often in these organizations, it is assumed that only central teams can manage costs. But developing the right culture requires teaching all teams—not just engineering or infrastructure—how to think about efficiency and productivity. Product and business teams need to be accountable not just for the building requirements of a new feature that generates more money, but that it runs well, is cost-efficient and is deployed on time.
Build champions and owners in all corners of the business who can take accountability for what is measured and how it is inspected. Shared responsibility helps leaders strike the right balance between oversight and undersight and ensures full participation from the bottom up in an organization.
Change The Language
As Daniel Pink writes in Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, people are moved largely by the desire to master their craft. I don’t know a single engineer or product person who wouldn’t rather spend more time building and doing great things than getting bogged down in inefficiencies.
Yet a lot of the language used by leaders only increases resistance. Nobody wants big brother over their shoulder measuring developer velocity and asking why they can’t go faster. By changing the way you frame the need for inspection, leaders can lessen the friction of oversight and turn productivity into a motivational opportunity to achieve more.
Communicate clearly how their jobs will be made easier and how the data will be used. Allowing teams to pilot the tools and giving them the data to make more informed decisions also creates a groundswell of support. It is a simple principle: If people see value in the tools, they will want more of them and become allies in the inspection process.
Create A Sustainable Culture
Cloud costs are one of the biggest expenses in any organization—and a pointer to how well efficiency and productivity have been integrated into the core of a business’s operating model. Companies often build their own tooling but can’t keep up with the complexity and demand. The lack of effective tooling and metrics impairs your ability to inspect and manage. Bad data leads to bad decisions.
Drawing from this lesson, there are several steps leaders can follow to implement metrics and accountability, typically over a three-year cycle.
• Get a baseline and agree on what will be measured and how improvements will be made.
• Put tooling in place in an enterprise-scalable way.
• Change or fine-tune the operating model of accountability and be clear about who are the right owners.
• Institute inspection measures as a routine part of business.
Creating a longstanding, sustainable culture where productivity is a key value and principle in the operating model starts during periods of growth. It is built both top-down and bottom-up in an organization, so leadership and teams are all working towards the same goals and cultivating a shared mindset. Once this culture has been achieved, conversations can then shift from managing resistance to how to manage constant, ongoing improvements.
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