DevEx, DORA, Effective 1:1s & Boring Strategy Docs

🙏 Points of inspiration for a perfect summer ⤵️

🎙️Team Efficiency & Developer Experience

Watch the exclusive podcast, dedicated to all things DORA and beyond! In this episode, Ben Parisot, Engineering Manager at Planet Argon, speaks in detail with our host, Kovid Batra, about how to effectively gauge team satisfaction and developer experience. They discussed measuring code quality, collaboration, and roadmap contribution as factors driving efficiency. Get to the full podcast to identify key areas of engineering efficiency to focus on, and tackle common metrics implementation challenges.

Full Podcast - https://grocto.substack.com/p/the-dora-lab-03-ben-parisot-engineering

Article of the Week ⭐

“We have found a valid, reliable way to measure software delivery performance that satisfies the requirements we laid out. It focuses on global, system-level goals, and measures outcomes that dif- ferent functions must collaborate in order to improve.”
– Forsgren, Humble, and Kim, Accelerate

🙈 How to Misuse & Abuse DORA Metrics
Software businesses are complex. It’s tempting to simplify it down to a few simple rules and metrics. But oversimplification merely incentivises for the ignored essential complexities to emerge in new and unexpected ways. Every time patterns emerge, naïve followers may apply solutions to those patterns in inappropriate context. We call these anti-patterns.

Bryan Finster is a Continuous Delivery expert who started the Minimum CD movement.

His paper highlights the common anti-patterns he observed in engineering organisations that emerged as a consequence of success and stability the DORA Metrics brought to the industry.

DORA Metric Anti-patterns
Focusing on Speed. It’s not about speed of movement from one column to another. Instead, the benefit is from creating features and rolling them out in lock-step without any waste or inventory in between.

Moving the Goalpost. The intent of continuous delivery is small batches of changes being...

Get to the Full Paper - https://bryanfinster.com/docs/papers/dora/

Upcoming Webinar - Implementing Engineering Metrics ft. Google DORA Lead, Nathen Harvey Put an end to all your DORA - HOWs & WHATs and take a leap towards driving engineering success.

Typo in collaboration with leading DORA expert Nathen Harvey & special guest Ido Shveki, VP R&D BeeHero brings a 45-minute live webinar session decoding successful DORA implementation for your dev teams.

Interested? Register using the link 👇
https://www.linkedin.com/events/7220033977321934849/comments/

Other highlights 👇

🤝 How to Make Your 1:1s the Most Efficient Tool in Your Toolbox One-on-one’s can be daunting. Especially if you’ve never been trained or coached on an approach that produces results. The default for most people is to “report” on their weekly activities. What a waste!

1:1 are NOT for status updates. Such matters should be handled in other meetings like daily stand-ups or sprint checkups.

Safe Space: Ensure confidentiality to build trust. Exceptions are action items like raises or policy changes.

Full Article - https://idoshveki.medium.com/how-to-make-your-1-1s-the-most-efficient-tool-in-your-toolbox-f66d8e98e8e6

💰 Making Engineering Strategies More Readable Your strategy documents are boring! Sorry

Start With the Recommendations
Policy: what does the strategy require or allow?

Operation: how is the strategy enforced and carried out, how do I get exceptions for the policy?

Refine: what were the load-bearing details that informed the strategy?

Diagnose: what are the more generalized trends and observations that steered the thinking?

Explore: what is the high-level, wide-ranging context that we brought into creating this strategy?

You can see where author Will Larson is going with this. Executed well, combined with good storytelling, a bit of editorial help and constant feedback from your peers, your boring documents are a matter of the past. Below are the issues to avoid and why this matters.

Key Issues with Traditional Writing
Too Long, Didn’t Read (TL;DR): Readers seeking quick answers might give up before reaching the key policy recommendations.

Approval Meeting Inefficiencies: Early questions about research and options can derail approval meetings if the policy is not presented upfront.

Transient Alignment: Separate strategy documents for thinking and policy can cause misunderstandings over time, especially with new team members.

Who asked?
Context can be boring. But it is also necessary. However, only to those to those readers that find the document relevant. You may recognise this structure as the McKinsey Pyramid: Start with the answer, expand on the supportive arguments, and explore the context for those who are still reading.

Thanks for reading!