The Engineering Leader’s Guide to Cycle Time

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Hillary Nussbaum
Oct 6, 2020
1 min read

One critical engineering metric can help you innovate faster, outrun your competition, and retain top talent: Cycle Time. It’s your team’s speedometer, and it’s the key to everything from developer satisfaction to predictable sprints. And Cycle Time has implications beyond engineering — it’s also an important indicator of business success.

That’s why we’re excited to announce the release of our new book, The Engineering Leader’s Guide to Cycle Time. For those looking to boost their team’s efficiency and productivity, we offer a data-driven approach, backed by research, case studies, and our own experience as an industry-leading Engineering Intelligence platform.

The book dives into the components of this critical metric, breaking down the development pipeline into distinct stages to highlight common bottlenecks and opportunities for acceleration. The foreword, by Edith Harbaugh, CEO and Co-Founder of LaunchDarkly, places Cycle Time in context, explaining how it’s integral to the latest shift in software development methodology — the shift towards CI/CD.

Download it now (it’s free!) for a breakdown of the most important engineering metrics, strategic advice on increasing engineering speed, and real-world advice from senior engineering leaders.

Why a Strategy Matters

At the heart of every successful software engineering team is a drive for three things:

1. A culture of continuous improvement
2. The ability to move from idea to impact quickly, frequently, and with confidence
3. A software organization delivering meaningful value

These goals sound simple enough, but in reality, achieving them requires more than just wishing for better performance. It takes data, action, and, most importantly, a cultural shift. And here's the catch: those three things don't come together by accident.

Step 1: Define Your Purpose

The first step in any successful engineering insights strategy is defining why you're doing this in the first place. If you're rolling out developer productivity metrics or an insights platform, you need to make sure there’s alignment on the purpose across the board.

One way I recommend approaching this is through the "Five Whys" technique. Ask why you're doing this, and then keep asking "why" until you get to the core of the problem.

Step 2: Understand Your People

Once the purpose is clear, the next step is to think about who will be involved in this journey. You have to consider the following:

1. Who will be using the developer productivity tool/insights platform?
2. Are these hands-on developers or executives looking for high-level insights?
3. Who else in the organization might need access to the data, like finance or operations teams?

Step 3: Define Your Process

The next key component is process—a step that many organizations overlook. It's easy to say, "We have the data now," but then what happens?

Step 4: Program and Rollout Strategy

The next piece of the puzzle is your program and rollout strategy.

Step 5: Choose Your Platform Wisely

And finally, we come to the platform itself. It’s the shiny object that many organizations focus on first, but as I’ve said before, it’s the last piece of the puzzle, not the first.

Looking Ahead

To build a successful engineering insights strategy, you need to go beyond just installing a tool. An insights platform can only work if it’s supported by a clear purpose, the right people, a well-defined process, and a program that rolls it out effectively.

Remember, a successful software engineering insights strategy isn’t just about the tool. It’s about building a culture of data-driven decision-making, fostering continuous improvement, and aligning all your teams toward achieving business outcomes. When you get that right, the value of engineering insights becomes clear.