EM to VPE; Agile 2025; Productivity Metrics; Software Delivery; Metric Movement
Issue #40 Bytes
🌱 Dive into Learning-Rich Sundays with groCTO ⤵️
🎙️ EM Breaking into Leadership ft. CS Sriram, VPE @ Betterworks
What does it take to scale as an engineering leader? C S Sriram, VP of Engineering at Betterworks, joins the groCTO podcast to share his journey from an Engineering Manager to VPE, unpacking the challenges of scaling teams, leadership growth, and making strategic engineering decisions.
His biggest insight? Coaching & mentorship are the backbone of great engineering leadership. Here is a quick sneak peek of the episode 👇
Watch the full episode?
Article of the Week ⭐
“When I worked in a 500-person program with 100+ teams worldwide, if we had used SAFe as it is designed today, we would have bankrupted the company. We didn't.”
The 5 Big Questions That Will Shape Agile in 2025
Vasco Duarte is famous for his contributions to the #noestimates movement brings his insights of how Agile is evolving in the past few years. It’s no surprise that these are topics you commonly find in your DORA google groups, your linkedin feed and on conferences:
How to scale agile in a large org?
Vasco critises frameworks like SAFe for introducing layers of planning and hierarchy that can dilute agility. In his concrete example the challenge of top-down command and lack of visibility exaggerates the complexities in communication for large organizations rather than solve them.
Instead he suggests crystal focus on decentralised decision making and lightweight process overhead, especially when it comes to recurring non-working meetings.
How to respond to change without losing focus?
Organizations are like a CPU. Running on a constant clock cycle, they can only handle interruptions once per tick. The faster the cycle the sooner the org adapts while also losing less resources in the shift.
Lean budgeting is the overarching concept that retains agility: budget to your immediate needs and areas of your plan that have confidence without defaulting to using a calendar, e.g. for rigid quarterly, annual roadmaps and budgets.
What’s beyond shift-left practices like TDD?
Shifting left is the idea that critical activities should happen as early as possible in the pipeline. Essentially shifting responsibility to the “first responder”. Collaboration is still a factor, but instead of accountability being assigned and disolved at each step of the process, it remains with the first responder and everybody else is contributing platforms and supports for having all the capabilities they need to perform their duties.
Acceptance Test-driven Development has seen a rise in the past few years to leverage modern tooling of orchestration and containerisation to stabilise otherwise flaky integration/e2e tests.
Vasco envisions an immediate future where modern tools (especially AI) Editor’s note: emphasis ours to embolden product engineers to put technical specifications and tests directly in high level specifications, reminiscent of modern approaches like Event Modeling.
How to manage technical debt?
Not all debt is the same. Technical debt is often criticised to being such an intangible concept that it does more harm than good in helping teams manage their software risk. The modern era of Software Engineering Intelligence has seen an emergence of metrics to help elucidate the friction in a team’s behavior which is often caused by unmitigated tech debt.
Such an approach allows strategy makers to create proxy indicators for the severity and risk areas involved to allow for objective decision making.
How to integrate product discovery into delivery?
By separating discovery from delivery, we’re reintroducing the same handoffs and silos that Agile was meant to eliminate. If we’re not careful, we’ll soon have:
A Project Manager for Discovery,
A Project Manager for Delivery, and
A Program Manager to make sure they talk to each other. 🤦
This is waterfall. It’s curious how much progress our industry has made in the past 40 years, but despite all evidence and case studies that suggest that working in short cycles with a fully collaborative or even ensembling team is crucial for success, the allure of control and planning mechanisms remains strong.
Other highlights 👇
Rolling Out Developer Productivity Metrics
Readers of this substack will be no strangers productivity metrics. Here are 7 considerations that will help you avoid common mistakes and ground your measurements in reality:
Be transparent: when introducing new metrics. Their results (and gathering) should never come as a surprise to stakeholders or the team. Prioritise bi-directional communication and ample time for feedback and review of new procedures.
Lead with benefits: Metrics when distinguishable at an individual level can appear punitive. Clarify what is being measured—rather than who or why—and how it will benefit the entire org, especially with examples of what success trends look like.
Set expectations: Change management can be a murky prospect. Don’t skimp on important meetings and including key people under the guise of trying to save time and be over-efficient.
Map out key players: People of influence will have overlaps of interests when it comes to benefiting from metrics. The numbers alone are rigid—it is crucial to tie them to perspective and already present initiatives of existing stakeholders.
Be sensible, private first: Metrics can often mean be twisted to mean many things. When problem areas are identified, talk to the key leader one on one without making drama.
Documentation: Publish an FAQ, guidelines and/or operating procedures on how to read metrics, how to measure, how to contribute and pace the surveys, what they could mean and ultimately, how to convert them into action.
Variety: Communicate frequently and with different approach. Mix it up to avoid stale, robotic habits. The decisions constantly shift, the data gathering should also.
Effective Software Delivery: A How-To Guide
Are your software projects consistently hitting their targets, or are you losing a significant chunk of them despite heavy investment? In today's complex development landscape, mastering effective software delivery is no longer a luxury—it's a necessity. Dive into this blog by Typo to discover seven best practices that will help you streamline your SDLC, boost team collaboration, and ultimately, deliver software that delights your customers and drives profitability.
The Quest to Understand Metric Movements
How to interpret all the data at your fingertips? This is a question the team at Pinterest set out to solve. Their approach comes with 3 different strategies to determine the root causes for the shift in metric trends.
Slice and Dice: for multidimensional measurements pick a tree of metric pivots and filter significant axes until the most significant contributor for the data swing is visible.
General Similarity: find pairs of metrics that behave similarly, recognizing positive associations and negative ones depending on the relative direction of movement.
Experiment Effects: typical A/B testing allows for precise proof for root causes and correlation. Though slower and more expensive to deploy compared to the other two forms of analysis, Experiments provide the highest confidence of the three.
Find Yourself 🌻
That’s it for Today!
Whether you’re innovating on new projects, staying ahead of tech trends, or taking a strategic pause to recharge, may your day be as impactful and inspiring as your leadership.
See you next week(end), Ciao 👋
Credits 🙏
Curators - Diligently curated by our community members Denis & Kovid
Featured Authors -
, Abi Noda, Pinterest Eng (Wu, Tallam, Shiao, Bajaj)Sponsors - This newsletter is sponsored by Typo AI - Ship reliable software faster.
1) Subscribe — If you aren’t already, consider becoming a groCTO subscriber.
2) Share — Spread the word amongst fellow Engineering Leaders and CTOs! Your referral empowers & builds our groCTO community.