Why your huge tech team isn’t delivering
“Our team used to go fast when it was small. Now we have ten times as many people and less work gets done. What happened?!”
Your workstream is controlled by people whose job it is to ship more features, and your software engineers think their job is to write code.
It’s complicated and of course there’s no magic bullet to make everything go fast again, otherwise you would have already done it by now.
Below are five reasons I’ve seen time and time again, though. Many companies that have a technology team of over 30 struggle with all five.
I was visiting an old workplace a few weeks ago, and someone stopped me in the hallway and asked, “Are you the person that wrote [an integration with another market] in only two months?”
Rewind the clock a decade ago: our company was New Zealand-based, and we were just about to move into another country. That would entail a huge amount of work, rewriting most of the system to deal with the different regulations and systems. My boss sent me away on a “working holiday” to bash it out, which I dutifully did as fast as I could.
I handed it back to the team two months later, 80% done. The team then spent the next year doing the next 80%. And now a large team continues to work on it ten years later, finishing off that last 80%.
