Recently, I had the chance to listen to a talk by Zia Syed (14+ years at Google, 20 years in industry). The talk was focused on what are the attributes of high performance engineering teams. It is available on YouTube [here]
Following are my notes and some of the points presented by Zia.
- Clarity of Purpose
This is a must thing. Having personal and work level OKRs to bring clarity, clear mandate and ownership. The objectives (goals) should be challenging but achievable. The Key Results should be measurable and customer driven, cost driven and strategic. Good communication with stakeholders is also fundamental.
- Fast Iteration speed
We have all heard the famous saying ‘Fail fast, learn faster’. However, the failing and learning process should be part of the planning and budgeting process with proper constraints in place.
To help facilitate the overall engineering process, the work culture should reward ‘automation’. Automation should be culturally driven. There should be considerable efforts and resources on experimentation (with automation supporting this). Fasters the experiences you run, faster you learn
Furthermore, design twice and write once - meaning you should give 2x time to your engineering design process as compared to doing the actual writing code.
- Psychology safety
We should be focused on building 10x teams instead of having 10x developers on the team. There should be diversity of opinions, freedom to speak up, freedom to make decisions and mistakes.
OKRs also play a key role here as they provide the clarity of role both at individual level and at the team level.
- Mastery of craft
Considerable thought process should go into projects where deep domain knowledge and expertise is required e.g. machine learning, AI etc. There should be investment in appropriate hardware and software resources (e.g. appropriate GPUs if doing model training)
- Sense of belonging
Engineering process has to be organic. Team relationships usually grow beyond work. The culture should be such that people try to go beyond the task and cover for each other. Team builds their own unique culture.
Here you can watch the full talk:
