Preface

By Otto Hilska, Founder & CEO of Swarmia

Engineering organizations are operating in unfamiliar territory. Not so long ago, hiring more engineers was the obvious solution to increase output and drive growth. Many engineering leaders fell into the trap of believing that the sheer increase in numbers would lead to getting more done.

Looking back, this never truly made sense. We’ve known since The Mythical Man-Month that adding people — especially if you do so quickly — is actually a recipe for slowing down, yet it was a path well-worn by countless companies.

Now the landscape has changed, and sometimes it feels like it happened overnight. Suddenly, there’s abundant uncertainty about how to deliver more business outcomes with fixed-size teams. Moreover, no company wants to do it in a way that strains the engineers doing the work. In fact, the most positive changes can occur with systematic approaches that make individual engineers more productive by improving the experience of building software in your organization.

Leaders are responsible for building the framework that allows teams and individuals to succeed in this new environment. It’s no longer about throwing more bodies into the fray and hoping everything works out. Today, it’s about implementing transparency, defining supportive processes, and driving coherent strategies that align the goals and incentives of the software engineers, their teams, and the products they build.

This book exists to help you navigate that space. There’s a never-ending stream of guidance out there about each of these topics — developer experience, developer productivity, and driving business outcomes — but very few resources that bring all of them together under a single umbrella. This book attempts to close that gap.

The systems and ecosystems we build to help us deliver software products are fundamentally human, and no organization is exactly like another. Whether you’re at the outset of a journey to hone the value created by your software development organization or you’re already somewhere along the way, finding the best path to success starts by understanding the unique context of your company.

To that end, this book is not a mere collection of recommendations; it’s a guide to understanding the bigger picture of engineering effectiveness, including hard-earned wisdom about the inevitable pitfalls and dead-end paths that may tempt you along the way.

If you find this topic as interesting as I do, this book is for you. Happy reading.