Single largest reason for loss of engineering productivity is not related to technology

Technology companies obsess over developer productivity. It is a term that is thrown around to describe the volume of meaningful output that engineers can produce. It is a psuedo metric and there is no real consistent way of measuring it.

Though you cannot measure it, you will know it when it is low.

Companies obsess over the tooling, framework of choice, CI/CD time, testing time and largely technical aspects to improve developer productivity. However, one of the largest hidden source of developer productivity is ineffective information flow through the organization.

Ineffective information flow

CEO - Build an autonomous driving technology that powers all the world’s cars

CPO - Build autonomous cars

Product VP - Build a high quality driving software

Engineering VP - Build software for cars this year

Engineering Director - Launch carplay in six months

Engineering Manager - Build carplay in four months

Tech Lead - Build carplay simulator this month

Senior Engineer - Build new UI widgets for simulator

Junior Engineer - Fixes bugs from last sprint

A year later….. we just have a buggy carplay simulator. A year of lost productivity. The original vision will probably take a decade to realize.

Communicating high fidelity information across various teams in the company is critical for success but almost never happens. improving this can give back years of lost engineering productivity for your organization.