Engineering Insights with Christina Forney

As companies scale, measuring team effectiveness becomes difficult. Engineering leaders rely on gut feelings to make decisions. Uplevel uses machine learning and organizational science to generate actionable insights. The platform increases velocity, decreases burnout, and improves release planning. Increasing organization size and complexity obfuscates what's happening in software development teams. A study found that CTOs are often disconnected from their teams' roadblocks and implications of decisions. CTOs make strategic decisions without understanding negative impacts on teams. There is a disconnect between leadership's perception of important initiatives and developers' actual workloads. This disconnect leads to frustration and a negative reinforcing cycle. Developers feel a lack of support and reinforcement from leadership. Dora Metrics provide some clarity but are only a small piece of the puzzle. Developers want to be tracked and have data used for better decision-making, but they are not satisfied with the metrics currently used by leadership. Metrics that developers want leaders to consider include deep work time and potential burnout. The demand for software engineers is higher than the supply, leading to increased salaries and potentially more pressure on engineers to deliver. There may be a need for a solution to balance the increasing demands on software engineers while maintaining their well-being. R&D costs are some of the largest costs for organizations building software. Leadership and boards want to know if they are getting a return on investment from their engineering team. Spending excessive time in meetings takes away from value-creating exercises. Onboarding new developers and chat interruptions slow down an organization. Many organizations only get around 50-60% capacity out of their team due to overhead and meeting costs. Increasing the capacity of the team can lead to more productivity within working hours. High salaries don't necessarily mean maximum potential is being reached due to barriers and roadblocks in the way. A study revealed that most software engineers are willing to have transparency with their boss regarding their work habits. Surprisingly, not everyone prefers asynchronous communication, with roughly a third preferring synchronous communication and a third preferring a mix of both. Developers often feel disconnected from leadership decisions, with only 4% saying they know what the leadership is working on. Inconsistency in development processes and tools makes data collection difficult within organizations. Up Level provides transparency and visibility across engineering organizations to help leaders understand metrics and advocate for change. An example is identifying that too many hours are spent in meetings, leading to a policy change like 'no meeting Wednesdays' to improve focus. Engineering leaders can create transparency by showing the impact of meetings on engineers' focus time. Transparency and understanding the why behind policy decisions can lead to more buy-in and alignment. Data around code reviews, conflicts in merge requests, and development cycle times can inform decisions and generate endorsement for new policies. Teams based in different time zones may experience high waiting times for review, which can be addressed by shuffling teams to better align based on time zones. CTOs need to be better connected to what developers are doing, and developers want meaningful metrics and insights for decision-making. Relying on gut feelings without data leads to incomplete understanding and manual methods of gathering information. A product like Uplevel that improves workflows based on real-world data could increase support for async work. The amount of people supporting async workflows will increase. A product like Uplevel and the mission it is trying to achieve and fulfill should become a reality. Attrition numbers are growing in the software engineering field. Every company in the world is a software company, so we need to get better at being humane and treating ourselves with respect based on data. I hope and believe that this hypothesis could come true.