Navigating Acquisitions; Context Switching; Data-driven Estimations; Optimizing CI/CD; Remote Teams' Schedule
Issue #38 Bytes
🌱 Dive into Learning-Rich Sundays with groCTO ⤵️
🎙️ Guiding Dev teams through acquisition ft. Sheeya Gem, DOE at ShareFile
🎙️Mergers & acquisitions can make or break a tech org! So how do you navigate them successfully? Hear it from the incredible Sheeya Gem, Director of Engineering & Product Strategy at Progress ShareFile in the groCTO podcast, where we discuss Sharefile’s acquisitions in journey.
She shared hard-earned lessons on managing stakeholders, building trust, and aligning dev teams during cultural transitions. Here is a quick sneak peek of the podcast👇
How can acquisitions be led better? Share your thoughts in the comments! 💬
Article of the Week ⭐
“Every time you send someone a ‘quick’ Slack message, it costs that person 23 minutes of productive work, and that's just the beginning of the problem.”
Context-switching is the main productivity killer for developers
will be no stranger to most of you. One of the most influential European Tech Coaches and Engineering Leaders, reaching hundreds of thousands of technologists every week on topics of leadership, systems design, architecture and product engineering.
Why developers struggle to stay productive
Context switching is a major productivity killer for developers. Even small interruptions—like a Slack message—can break focus and cause delays. Research shows it takes 23 minutes on average to regain deep focus after an interruption. That confusion you feel when alt-tabbing from your email to writing code? That’s it.
Developers rely on mental models to understand complex systems. Every distraction forces them to reload that mental model, which slows them down and increases errors. Over time, this leads to mental fatigue and lower-quality code.
How to reduce context switching
Silence notifications during deep work sessions.
Set clear focus blocks—dedicate time for coding without interruptions with a clear goal for the day.
Batch communications—check emails and messages at set times.
Offload lists of TODOs onto tools—get them out of engineer’s heads so they can focus
Take rest and leave breadcrumbs—make it easier for yourself to retrace back to where you were after a break
By controlling distractions, developers can protect their focus, write better code, and work more efficiently.
Why do interruptions hit engineers so hard?
Engineers juggle many small details that require their precise attention. Often, when dealing with software architecture they play a complex game of jenga in their minds. Any interruption will make the bricks fall and require restoration.
Time spent regaining cognitive context and focus are a significant contributor to higher tech debt and bugs on a daily basis.
Flow State
Flow state is a mental state in which work feels effortless and time seems to disappear (your abilities match the challenge you face). For developers, it's when complex problems suddenly become clear and elegant solutions emerge naturally.
Engineering teams constantly ebb and flow along the edge of too-challenging and boring. Flow state is achieved in the sweet spot where business needs meet the right level of challenge. Engineers during deep work will naturally converge towards this state but it is very fragile. It takes time to ease into this state and any interruption will require lengthy periods to re-focusing, wasting precious mental energy.
Protocol for interruptions
Milan shares lessons from his teams on how to manage interruptions so they dampen the impact it has on individual and by extension the entire team’s productivity:
Interruption protocols: Rules on how to prioritise matters, reserving interruptions only for the most urgent and important.
Focus time agreements: Blocked time on the calendar for everyone on the team where notifications and chatter are minimised with no meetings.
Normalize saying NO: Help engineers hold themselves accountable to tracking their own mental workload and saying no without ill will when they are busy.
Make meetings meeningful: Clear agenda, schedule them around natural breaks and encourage engineers to skip meetings where they cannot contribute so as to put the burden of focus on the meeting organizer.
Other highlights 👇
Use data-driven estimations to predict project timelines
Jocelyn James is a manager engineering at Bitly. In her LeadDev interview she shares her strategies for gathering data and making objective decisions to suplant gut-based assumptions with regards to project timelines, estimations and planning work.
But data in estimations usually leads to micromanagement and process reinforcement metrics.
Tracking well: a way to gather data better to understand a team’s ticket productivity/completion rate.
Tracking badly: micromanage engineers with quotas that become a source of anxiety.
Ironically, this is reminiscent of movements such as #noestimates and capacity planning. While the approach she suggests reminds of Scrum-esque velocity burndown tracking, the key factor is in converting those data into actionable insights:
Have a clear project trajectory: Plan projected milestones according to the rate of finished work, not the estimated ticket complexity.
Plan the entire project on the aggregate team level: Avoid hyper-fragmenting along assigned work individually and focus on the team’s average across the listed priorities.
Optimizing your CI/CD with DORA metrics
Slow deployments and frequent rollbacks frustrate teams and erode customer trust. DORA metrics provide a data-driven approach to identify and address bottlenecks in your CI/CD pipeline. You can accelerate software delivery while minimizing risks by focusing on key metrics like deployment frequency and change failure rate.
This blog by Typo explores how to leverage DORA metrics to optimize your CI/CD process and achieve faster, more reliable releases.
Software development as an exercise in human relationships
Kent Beck appeared on Tuple’s Distributed Podcast with Jack Hannah to discuss the management of remote teams. They emphasised psychological safety and collaboration from Kent’s experience from Meta and Gusto.
What stood out to us that may interest you is this section on how Kent envisions the ideal work-day for a collaborative high-performing team:
How’s it start?
Team time: a two hour working block at the start of each day. Everyone present. Together.1. What’s the most important thing to do today? That’s the main event.
2. What happened yesterday? They talk about it, sometimes.
3. Then folks would break into pairs as a part of that block to get into the real work.
His team would do these two hour blocks twice daily.
No meeting interruptions. Sacred.
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 -
, Jocelyn James, Jack Hannah w/Sponsors - This newsletter is sponsored by Typo AI - Ship reliable software faster.
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