Move beyond measurement & inspire developer productivity w/ Laura Tacho #162

The Engineering Leadership Podcast

Laura Tacho, CTO @ DX, joins us to discuss why changing what you measure doesn’t necessarily lead to improved productivity (and what to do about it)! How to define and measure productivity in your eng org is one of the hottest topics for eng leaders… We cover best practices for identifying what productivity looks like in your org, what motivates your team to reach those goals, how to harness behavioral psychology, and antipatterns to avoid when you focus on productivity. Plus Laura shares some of her favorite practices to identify your skill gaps, and how define what success looks like for yourself and your teams on your productivity journey.

ABOUT LAURA TACHO

Laura Tacho is CTO at DX, a developer experience company. She previously led teams at companies like CloudBees, Aula Education, and Nova Credit. She’s an expert in building world-class engineering organizations that consistently deliver outstanding results. Laura has coached CTOs and other engineering leaders from startups to the Fortune 500, and also facilitates a popular course on metrics and engineering team performance.

"That is just a ripe environment for the rapid degradation of trust within an organization and has immeasurable consequences when it comes to degrading the culture of a team. I think the temptation is there, understandably, and I think from good intentions of, ‘I want to try to measure unobtrusively. I want to get this data about my team without them knowing about it or minimally knowing about it so that I'm not bothering them.’ That is a trap because we don't need to treat people the same way we treat distributed systems with dashboards and dashboards of telemetry data. People can talk. Just ask them.”

- Laura Tacho

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SHOW NOTES:

• Why people care so much about measuring productivity in engineering (3:25)
• Antipatterns to avoid when tightening focus on productivity (5:08)
• The role of behavioral psychology with engineering productivity (7:04)
• What the ideal consulting relationship looks like structurally (8:58)
• Ensure you’re incentivizing the behavior you want to achieve (12:20)
• How to cultivate the skill of influencing without feeling too “salesy” (13:59)
• Understanding the different facets / types of motivation (17:08)
• Strategies for developing resiliency in “do more with less” environments (19:14)
• Behaviors that prevent eng orgs & leaders from achieving their goals (23:55)
• How to identify areas of personal development & closing the skill gap (27:00)
• Areas that are the most ripe for setting the right expectations / outcomes (29:40)
• Best practices for eng leaders to gain clarity & define what success looks like (32:01)
• Rapid fire questions (35:52)

LINKS AND RESOURCES

• Remarkably Bright Creatures -Shelby Van Pelt’s exploration of friendship, reckoning, and hope, tracing a widow's unlikely connection with a giant Pacific octopus.
• This Podcast Will Kill You - Grad students studying disease ecology, Erin and Erin found themselves disenchanted with the insular world of academia. They wanted a way to share their love of epidemics and weird medical mysteries with the world, not just colleagues.
• lauratacho.com - Laura’s website where you can find more information about her courses, coaching, and management program.

This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team:

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/