choong pw

In today’s fast-paced business environment, even companies need to innovate and adapt quickly to stay competitive. We are not exempted from this too. One of the strategies we have been pitching and practicing is “Accountability.” Starting a notion to operate like a startup requires us to rework some parts of our processes and culture.

Backstory

Most of our apps were acquired about a year and a half ago. These apps are considered mature products that require strong engineering teams to support new features and bug fixes while maintaining a strong resiliency of product uptime.

As we were migrating and transitioning these apps to the new owner, it also marked a new era for us. Starting back from the ground to build the next money-generating machine for the company. To move fast, we need to give the team autonomy. That’s where the notion of this blog post starts, and we also want to share some thought processes that we went through.

Transparency

We want the team teams produce high-quality work, meet allocated time estimates, and continuously improve. As engineering managers, we can influence the team’s mindset by providing transparent information. One way of us doing it is by providing the rough running cost of the team. This helps teams understand the impact of the time spent on tasks, being more context aware of the commited scope and delivery.

There are alot of areas we have embarked to make it transparent. Ultimately, we want to help team to have enough context and information to make decision.

Forward planning

We become critical in our forward planning process. Adopting a “planned time” approach for forward planning is essential in reducing downtime and ensuring that teams are working on major epics within quarters. By giving autonomy to the team to craft their path, motivation and engagement increase. When team members feel a sense of ownership for their work, they are more motivated and engaged in the project, ultimately leading to higher-quality work and meeting deadlines.

Clear expectation

By setting both short-term and long-term visions, we learned to identify key metrics for success. Every week, we talk about them, ensuring that blockers are highlighted and proper follow-ups are in place.

We want to empower the team with autonomy to take ownership of their work and make decisions. As long as it is still aligned with the business goal, we trust the team to make the final call.

Conclusion

Fostering accountability has been one of our major focus for the development team improve performance and productivity. Although the result has not been significant, is not final. We are definately in the right direction, as the compounding effect of the work starts to kick in.