Case 8: The Productivity Paradox: A Strategic Approach to Build a Sustainable Engineering Organization
You join a series D funded fintech company that is growing big, as an engineering leader, leading a growing team in terms of its head count. The opportunity is big and the executive leadership is having a big expectation to have you turn things around quickly in engineering. The company celebrates burn-out and you see everyone from top to bottom working for long hard hours.
In the very first month you witness the following issues - production downtime of services, release rollbacks, bugs creeping to production, shared dev environment in the cloud becoming unstable resulting in development down-time from few hours up to 2 days to identify and fix issues, team members non attending stand-ups because either they had stayed put late last night or unwell or into fixing production issues. Teams have monthly sprints/iterations in their scrum methodology and do end up picking a lot of ad-hoc tasks during the sprint. The development team gets their requirements chalked out as PRDs from the Product Managers usually before they start their work but often see changes to it as the developers seek clarity from it as they are are developing the features. QA spend enormous amount of time diligently testing manually and yet end up missing some errors because of environment issues in QA sandboxes.
Everyone does multi-tasking in the company and you too are expected to be a part of that culture. The executive leadership is surprised that the development cost is increasing and the team's productivity is declining, although everyone seem to be working hard.
What is you think is going wrong with a fantastic team of individuals? How would you go about fixing things given the company's ambitious plans to increase its headcount to overcome its challenges and realize its growth ambitions in revenue?