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7 Simple Steps That Helped My Engineering Teams Thrive
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Between 2016 and 2021, my engineering teams delivered major work at breakneck speed. What I learned from that period wasn’t about special talent - it was about protecting focus, keeping communication tight and giving engineers the conditions they needed to do deep work.
These seven practical steps don’t depend on a perfect org chart. They are repeatable habits that almost any team can adopt with discipline and consistency.
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Keep stand-ups short and on point - Stand-ups are for alignment, not debate. Keep the team focused because, while engineers often feel compelled to justify their work, others simply want to get back to work.
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Move discussions to follow-up meetings - If a deeper conversation is needed, book it right after the stand-up. Let the right people opt in, instead of trapping the whole team in a conversation that doesn’t concern them.
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Protect morning periods - For most engineers, mornings are prime productivity time. Avoid booking meetings then, so they can tackle their hardest problems when they’re freshest.
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Give engineers long, contiguous blocks - A fragmented schedule kills an engineer’s momentum. Engineers need those long blocks to get into the zone and tackle complex problems. As Paul Graham explained in Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule, managers think in half-hour slots, but engineers need hours at a stretch.
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Respect flow - It takes around 15-20 minutes to reach a state of deep concentration known as ‘flow’. This is where the real work and breakthroughs happen. Any interruption, no matter how trivial, resets the clock - and that productive state may never be recovered during that session.
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Resist the urge to chase updates between stand-ups - If an engineer has committed to delivering something by tomorrow, trust them and let them work. Repeated status checks signal distrust, create disruption, and ironically slow the very delivery you’re chasing.
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Provide air cover - As a manager, your job is to absorb the noise. In many organizations, more people ask for status updates than actually produce code. Shield your team from constant interruptions by being the main information buffer. Let them focus on building while you coordinate requests and share the right updates at the right time. Encourage others to route enquiries to you first, and keep the team’s communication channels clear rather than letting them be flooded with ad hoc demands.
These seven practices are simple, but simplicity alone is not enough. When you protect focus, keep meetings lean and buffer your team from unnecessary noise, the work flows more smoothly and the team can deliver reliably without burning out.
Tip: Despite an abundance of encouragement, one of my teams struggled to keep the stand-up to time. In the end, I introduced an egg-timer that got passed around as each person gave their update. It was set to a two-minute interval for each person, and if the alarm went off while you were holding it, you had to incur a forfeit, such as a coffee run to the local cafe. Needless to say, that prop helped keep focus and stand-ups ran to time after that.
In the next article, I’ll explain how we built the culture, trust, autonomy and technical excellence that made those habits sustainable over time.
Donnacha Forde
#management #software-engineering #productivity #engineering-leadership