"Is Engineering Working Hard Enough?"

What steps do you take to investigate the cause of schedule slippages? Mainly, how do you deal with leadership who simply don’t believe engineers are ‘working hard enough’? However unfounded?

This is an it depends questions because the answers are dependent on the all of the humans (all different) on a team (with a culture) in a company (with even more culture).

Warning signs I am looking for throughout the release include:

• Are their estimates reasonable?

• Have they accounted for the fact that stuff always goes wrong, and have they buffered appropriately?

• Do they understand the thing they are building? Can they explain that thing?

• Have they prioritized the work in important and less important features? (So they can nuke less important stuff when things go wrong.)

• How do they make decisions? Does it take forever? Do they need me? Do they wait too long?

• When I ask questions, do they have good answers?

However, this is the question: “How do you deal with leadership who simply don’t believe engineers are ‘working hard enough’? However unfounded?” This has nothing to do with the engineer’s ability to “work hard.” A leadership team that does not understand how a product is built asks this question. Now, is it the CEO’s job to understand how the product is built by an engineering and design team? Yes, in fact, it is. It’s their job to understand how it all works.

When a senior leader asks me this question (which I hope you can tell drives me banana balls), I ask, “Why do you think engineering isn’t working hard enough?” Now, there are two answers. One is a hand-wavy “I don’t know” answer designed not to say “I don’t know” but to sound impressive. You’ll know it when you hear it. If the folks in charge are playing this game, you have other problems. Different answer. The other answer contains actual data like, “Well, they keep missing their commitments.”

Ok, now we have a problem definition. This person believes the team isn’t hitting commitments. Is this true? It’s not? Fix: explain to this person why they are wrong. It’s true? Fix: figure out why they are missing their commitments. Start with that incomplete list of warning signs above.

I bristle at this second question because it’s usually gossip. I hear the team isn’t working hard enough. Gossip (especially inaccurate gossip) about my team drives me up the wall.

Yup, there’s a new The Important Thing.