Hiring top technical talent: best practices to find and attract the right people for your product team.
This article has been featured on Fierce Electronics.
Engineering was the very first creative expression that Human Beings started demonstrating as they evolved from figuring out how to make fire to inventing the wheel to finding ways of extending their capabilities and reach further and further.
My name is Sashank Purighalla, and I am an Engineering Leader with more than 22 years of experience in building and scaling multi-faceted Engineering teams in a multitude of industries. I have had an opportunity to do this in companies ranging from startups with just a handful of resources to large enterprises with hundreds of Engineers spread across multiple continents.
In this article, I am sharing the principles and practices that I believe engineering teams should adopt to create impactful products.
As we explore this topic, it is important that we understand Engineers and how they like to work. While this may be termed “company culture” by many, I have found that engineering teams tend to create their own sub-cultures within companies. This stems from the fact that engineers are wired to think and work differently than some of the other professionals.
Engineers love challenges. Engineers don’t mind putting it those additional hours just because they want to. Engineers get their dopamine kick when they have cracked that difficult problem. And Engineers thrive on constant learning.
Great teams therefore are formed when a group of driven engineers work for missions that they believe are larger than themselves and are worth toiling for alongside other engineers and thinkers that challenge them and help bring out the best in them.
The formula to build and retain a world-class engineering team to create cutting-edge products then is to assemble a team of capable engineers, clarifying how their work fits into the company’s strategy, and inspiring them to make it happen.
This however is not exactly easy to accomplish! It calls for good engineers and great leaders. Let’s unpack both:
What are the characteristics of great engineering teams?
It is often said that tech-enabled and tech-based companies are only as good as their engineering teams. The best teams work with a sense of urgency, a desire for producing high quality products at a low cost and with a fierce focus on customer experience.
- Great engineering teams understand the company strategy very clearly and are bought in to the vision and the mission
- They are aware of their fiduciary responsibility to the company
- They are laser focused on delivering against the greatest ROI for their company and do not hesitate to ruthlessly prioritize and reprioritize their work as necessary
- They strive to understand their end users and focus on customer experience and focus their product designs for most impact
- They make data-driven decisions and are constantly refining the metrics that are necessary to guide decision making
- They are process oriented and are hyper focused on their overall effectiveness and efficiency
- They are constantly communicating the business case for each project to the rest of the company and are willing to adjust their priorities when needed
- They are constantly learning the latest and greatest tools, sharing their learnings with their teammates, and are bringing relevant tools up to their respective leaders
What are the characteristics of a great engineering leader?
Engineering is often one of the largest if not the largest cost centers for a growing company. The engineering leader must therefore hold himself/herself accountable to the accomplishment of the goals of the company and the ROI from his/her team(s).
- The engineering leader strives to clarify the strategy, vision, and mission to his/her team and often is instrumental in further crystallizing the strategy to further the company’s mission and goals
- The engineering leader creates a roadmap for the accomplishment of the company’s goals and create 360-degree visibility to break the big audacious goals into tangible, realistic chunks
- The engineering leader is one of the primary stakeholders for the project and is tracking and making decisions based on cost of goods vs. the expected ROI and is constantly thinking about his/her decisions in terms of topline revenue impact and maximizing the bottom line
- The engineering leader holds the ultimate responsibility for aligning the tech strategy with the overall company strategy
- An engineering leader encourages his/her team to take data driven decisions and introduces the process, product, and quality metrics that are necessary to aid decision making a core part of the methodology and technical design
- The engineering leader builds a mature, repeatable, yet malleable agile process to constantly validate if the projects that he/she is initiating are aligned with the highest priorities of the company.
- The engineering leader organizes his/her team while being cognizant of its total capacity
- He/she optimizes the handling of strategic, operational, and R&D items for balancing organizational initiatives around maintaining competitive advantage and handling ongoing maintenance while not overlooking security and compliance
- He/she is constantly furthering the team’s talent and is attracting and hiring new talent
How to build and scale a great engineering team?
The key to the success of a team is building momentum.
Winning is one of the primary motivators for any team and a win breeds the next win which in turn breeds the next win and so on until winning becomes a habit.
Quite the same, when teams get onto a losing spree, they tend to get onto a downward spiral that crushes motivation and destroys momentum to a point where teams can feel paralyzed.
The leader’s highest responsibility to their team is to find a way to help them get that first win and then the next win. This generates momentum!
A win in the engineering sense is impact that is created on your end customers, quickly, and with a high ROI for the company.
Momentum for engineering teams is impact times speed of delivery:
Momentum = Impact * Speed of Delivery
Building momentum is a critical component of ongoing successful delivery and is, therefore, for every leader to consider. In this context, we can measure the outcome of momentum simply as the rate at which a team achieves its goals.
In other words, it is effectiveness (impact) with efficiency (speed).
This also translates to “proficiency”: A proficient professional delivers high impact, quality products or services quickly!
How do you maximize impact?
As stated earlier, impact is created when you create exceptional customer experience with high ROI. For this, the engineering team must:
- be absolutely clear about the market that they are serving/ building a product for, understand the user and the expected outcome of the product
- be aware of the project budget and architect/design the product based on those parameters
- focus on customer experience
- deliver early and often. The catch-phrase “less but better” can be a great guiding principle
- make data-driven decisions that are rooted in analytical rigor over hunches, ego, or personal preferences
- develop a business case for every initiative that they work on, regularly communicating the rationale behind each project
- create transparency and visibility into the process to enable the non-technical and business stake holders to weigh in and inform priorities when needed
- be agile and adaptable to market feedback
How do you maximize speed of delivery?
An entire new disciple of software engineering recently emerged in the service of fast, high-quality delivery: DevOps. This is a branch that practically every software engineering team in the world is adopting quickly and is heavily investing in.
Delivering quickly on initiatives and responding quickly to market demands is a competitive advantage that every company and as a result, every team must strive for.
Speed of delivery is a resultant of not just DevOps or automation, rather, it stems from the team’s ability to be aligned around the principles that enable speed.
+ Making impactful decisions fast
- If a decision can be easily reversed, make it quickly. It does not need to be over analyzed and approved
- Empower the person or the team closest to the ground to decide
- If you are mostly certain, make the decision. Indecision is worse than a bad one. Encourage a disagree and commit attitude
- Recognize if a decision is going poorly and be quick to course correct
+ Ship fast and learn quickly
- The best products are built by testing in the real-world and learning from the feedback collected
- Perfection is the enemy of good
- Less but better: Remember the Pareto principle (the 80-20 rule): 80% of the impact can be made with 20% effort. Do not however, compromise on the quality of your smaller chuck of delivery – You do not want to lose iterations to bug fixes
+ Automate once you are convinced about the effectiveness of your solution: DevOps applies here!
- Automating too early or too late can crush speed of delivery
- Differentiate between the creative aspects of your team and the mundane ones – Repetitive, human error prone, standard parts may be offloaded to robots
You cannot go wrong with hiring
- Smaller teams that are tightly knit and are mission focused invariably outperform highly resourced teams that are not coordinated
- Coordination is a combination of a positive attitude, adequate skill, great communication, fierce focus on the goal, and the ability to place the team’s interest over self interest
- One rotten apple spoils the entire basket
Don’ts
- Don’t confuse product with technology
- Don’t forget that engineering is for creating business impact
- Don’t be consumed by the shiny object syndrome
- Don’t forget that you are building for an outcome that has a commercial end
Conclusion
Engineering management and being a great engineer are both equally difficult. Great engineers and great engineering leaders are hard to come by. But like with anything else, these are skills that can be acquired with maturity, self-awareness, and the desire to excel.
End of the day, your business is only as good as the Engineering Team! Your Business is the Product.
