Team Performance Series
How to Build a High-Performing Engineering Team
Building up a high-performance team takes a variety of skills - from general management to engineering management, and hiring right.
Building up a high-performance team takes a variety of skills - from general management to engineering management, and hiring right.
In the world of technology, VPs of Engineering and CTOs aim to build high-performance teams capable of delivering quality products on time, it's rare for someone to do this consecutively successfully.
Building up a high-performance team takes a variety of skills - from general management to engineering management, and hiring right.
From creating manifestos and goal setting, and staying involved with career roadmaps to motivating team members, here’s how leaders can create a high-performing engineering team.
Getting alignment in your team on your "north star" helps decentralise decision-making
Engineers and technical talent love hitting their numbers, but are you aiming for the right targets?
Reward technical and managerial excellence by structuring the right benefits and compensation
From day one, make sure you've got a clear idea of what you want to accomplish. HubSpot Co-founder and CTO Darmesh Shah said he relies heavily on guiding goals to lead the team and ensuring that everyone is pulling in the same direction. Leaders can leverage the following steps to build their goals:
Having a laser-sharp focus on what your main business goals are, who and what kills you need ensures that everyone is working towards optimising returns of efforts.
For a team to be successful, the VP of Engineering at Harvest, Kevin Stewart strongly believes in having a solid hiring plan and strategy in place, including the most suitable benefits, budgeting & compensation package.
When hiring, it’s also important to recognize diversity among teammates—being receptive to different points of view, acknowledging errors and valuing individual contributions are just some ways to build a multi-talented and open culture. The success of world-class processes can't exist without a diverse team that is willing to try out new solutions and challenge existing ones.
Structuring a team does not just mean adding new members but removing those who do not align anymore. With the exception of dangerous or drastic actions - it's vital to provide people with opportunities for corrective actions when possible.
Gregory Chang, Head of Sales & Customer Experience at StoreHub, believes that culture is one of the most important assets for a team. A cultural code sounds trivial at first glance, but he established that these documents or materials are critical for:
Kevin Scott, former VP of LinkedIn also advises asking 'how' before 'what'. A lot of managers and engineers focus on the method - What strategy is best?, What should we standardise? You will realise once you’ve shift your approach from “What?” to “How?”, more enduring solutions arise.
For example, try first asking yourself: How am I going to lead them? Or better yet: How can my teammates thrive? Let this line of inquiry re-orientate the entire team's collective mindset towards winning together.
When discussing how Hubspot attracted exceptional people, Shah explains,
“One of the core tenets of HubSpot culture is that we want to increase individual market value. In other words, we want someone’s currency to have risen higher at HubSpot than any other place they could have gone. We think this focus on individual market value will make for a better, higher-performing team — but it also helps with attracting exceptional people.”
Stewart concurs that using career ladders and roadmaps as a recruitment tool shows the foresight which leaders put into their future employees. Creating roadmaps tailored specifically to fit each individual, with detailed outlines of expectations and resources is necessary so that they can feel valued in their teams and company and fuel their inspiration to perform.
It created not only an environment where high performance was encouraged but also one which attracted similar exceptional talents; those who love learning, seeing growth and advancement.
Hotjar’s new VP of Engineering, Mohannad Ali leverages Amazon's 'Growth Flywheel Theory' to transform energy from the team at individual scales through goal setting. Mohannad gets buy-in from his team by laying out old business cases so everyone knew what was needed for success. He would also make sure that people were given more responsibility as well as accountability when he gave them open lines of communication, feedback and goals.
The result? A highly motivated team who is eager to bring home more wins. They do this by constantly reflecting on the project, prioritising tasks and taking advantage of “high-velocity decision-making” approach- a cornerstone under Jeff Bezos' leadership style - which involves empowering employees with skills and independence to execute decisions quickly and efficiently.
This iterative process ultimately lets members understand how their work connects back to the company's overarching strategy, rather than getting lost in the sea of speculation fueled primarily by self-interest.
Having a laser-sharp focus on what your main business goals are, who and what kills you need ensures that everyone is working towards optimising returns of efforts.
Okta CEO Todd McKinnon offers that the most important principles in executing a high-performance team are: iteration, bottom-up empowerment and open communication. With diverse people and potentially virtual teams, setting up explicit rules so all team members are aware of these regulations allows for growth by understanding.
Communicating takes many forms, including the results from iterations and recognising escalating misalignments early on in order to remedy them before they become too serious. This may look like one-on-one meetings or conducting company-wide surveys.
The more people know about what is going on within an organization, the better; deferring to individual teammates and trusting them to come up with a solid plan for every iteration helps keep everyone involved while at the same time getting things done faster.
Making team participation completely voluntary encourages personal commitment which leads not just to higher productivity but increased engagement with the right members.
The result? A highly motivated team who is eager to bring home more wins. They do this by constantly reflecting on the project, prioritising tasks and taking advantage of “high-velocity decision-making” approach- a cornerstone under Jeff Bezos' leadership style - which involves empowering employees with skills and independence to execute decisions quickly and efficiently.
This iterative process ultimately lets members understand how their work connects back to the company's overarching strategy, rather than getting lost in the sea of speculation fueled primarily by self-interest.
We asked five NewCampus Contributors to weigh in with their tips on building top-performing engineering teams that work well cross-functionally:
Getting alignment in your team on your "north star" helps decentralise decision-making
Engineers and technical talent love hitting their numbers, but are you aiming for the right targets?
Reward technical and managerial excellence by structuring the right benefits and compensation
Building strong engineering teams don't stop after one cycle - each one has its own timeline based on the structure of the organization and what they're working on together.
People are brought onto teams and learn, contribute, grow and then sometimes leave. What remains are lessons learned about how to build on a foundation for success, one which grows stronger over time because it was built right in the first place.
For hypergrowth companies seeking to scale their products and their people, NewCampus offers management training through our Management Essentials 4-Week Sprint.
Hear what some of our previous learners had to say:
We'd love to chat about how we can help scale your teams and grow your business.
