Accelerate Growth: Transform Your Software Team With These 5 Vital Questions
Supporting and aligning with your software teams is a must to stay ahead in today’s highly competitive business market, as companies increasingly rely on technology to innovate and give value to consumers.
However, the complex nature of current software development might present difficulties, and it is your job as a leader to guarantee that your software teams work correctly and successfully.
Here are five basic yet important questions to ask your technical staff to help you better support your software teams.
1. What is the duration of our workflows?
According to my company’s recent study, software teams who track and meet the following benchmarks have a high level of success in their software delivery practice so they have an advantage over competitors.
- “Workflow durations are ten minutes or less.”
- “Any failed run is fixed or reverted in less than an hour.”
- “Their application’s default branch has a success rate of more than 90%.”
- “They deploy as many times as their business needs at least once per day.”
In this case, “workflow duration” refers to the duration of time it takes to carry out a job from start to finish, such as verifying a change or receiving feedback on a code change.
It matters to have fast processes in a fast-paced technological world.
This is not just to guarantee that deadlines are kept and possible defects and issues are resolved before they reach your clients’ hands, but also to help your technical staff in staying in the flow.
Long workflow durations slow down every software-enabled activity, therefore improving this measure is undoubtedly worth the effort.
Asking about process durations with your engineering team will help you find any problems or errors that might be affecting your team’s growth.
2. How constantly are we deploying?
The frequency with which the team deploys new code to production is referred to as deployment frequency.
Frequent deployments allow the team to make changes fast and respond to consumer or stakeholder feedback.
However, deploying a lot might cause instability and increase the possibility of introducing bugs or problems.
Co-metrics such as success rate can help developers find the amount of accuracy of what is being deployed.
It’s all about knowing what these signs and data points are telling you as a leader.
Use what you know about your company as a road map to make changes, improve on what works, and develop what works.
While making sure your teams meet or surpass the above expectations, here are some additional critical questions to ask to make sure that you are on the same page as your technical teams.
3. What’s on your mind?
Asking open-ended questions is a simple yet powerful technique that helps your technical teams solve problems.
This question will help you in determining how your staff feels about their job as well as any issues that might be causing damage to their productivity or morale.
Leaders might start to put together themes and get closer to understanding possible challenges and solutions if they listen carefully enough.
4. What is keeping you from being successful?
Knowing what’s affecting the success of your technical staff is important to creating solutions and boosting team performance.
By asking this question, you can gain insight into the team’s lives and help by removing any impediments to their success.
Understanding what comes up for people that stop them from achieving their goals is an excellent way for finding potential disconnects in your company.
Your primary purpose as a leader or decision-maker is to help your engineering team in succeeding.
By asking this question, you can show your staff that you are devoted to their growth and development.
5. What should we be doing differently?
Asking your technical staff about what you as a leader can do differently will help you find areas for growth and receive insights on how to better support the team.
This question can help you understand the needs of the team and suggest areas for growth and development.
Another method I use to identify areas for improvement is to put myself in the shoes of the developer.
For example, and perhaps because I like creating and testing software for pleasure, I sometimes do a basic activity on our platform, such as merging a pull request, to experience the user journey.
I take notes as I go and ask myself, “Was it simple, or were there areas for improvement?” By putting yourself in your developers’ shoes and always looking for ways to improve, you can build a speedier, more flexible company that has a stronger chance to foster innovation and give value to consumers.
As a leader, it is more important than ever to prioritize strong knowledge and consistency with your software teams.
You can inspire and empower your company towards greatness by actively interacting with your software teams, understanding their needs, and connecting their goals with the wider objectives of your company.
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