Pamela FurstSenior Manager, Customer Success

5 Questions Engineering Leaders Should Ask to Improve Autonomous Teams

Name: 5 Questions Engineering Leaders Should Ask to Improve Autonomous Teams
Uploaded: 2022-08-25T14:00:01+00:00
Duration: 1 min 39 s
Channel: Pamela Furst
Description: In this video, two speakers outline five diagnostic questions that engineering leaders can use to evaluate and improve the autonomy of their teams. The…

25 Aug 2022 · 2 min

Watch on YouTube

1:39

In this video, two speakers outline five diagnostic questions that engineering leaders can use to evaluate and improve the autonomy of their teams. The first question examines the "say‑do ratio," measuring how much of what a team promises to deliver is actually delivered. The second asks how teams are currently spending their time versus how they should be allocating effort, emphasizing the need for product and engineering managers to align work with product value. The third focuses on Mean Time to Restore (MTTR), assessing how quickly a team can recover from incidents. The fourth probes the team’s confidence in making changes without causing failures, linking this confidence to the observed MTTR. The final question investigates deployment friction, looking at how long even the smallest change takes to roll out and identifying ways to reduce that latency, especially for emergency fixes. Together, these questions help leaders surface concerns, track progress toward outcomes, and drive improvements in reliability, delivery speed, and team autonomy.

Chapters

What are those 5 key questions that help teams identify areas of concern and to surface information to the leadership team? How can they articulate progress towards their outcomes? This sounds familiar to you if you were in the last fireside chat. So what is our say-do ratio? This is something that we think it's important for our teams to understand. In other words, how much of what we say we are going to deliver do we actually deliver? Next question that we ask is, how are we spending our time today versus how we want to be spending our time. So it's important to have a viewpoint on how teams should be spending their time. Specifically, the product manager and engineering managers should have this point of view, understanding what is most valuable to their product right now and in the future.
When we break things, how quickly can we restore? So regardless of what you're doing, what type of functionality you're rolling out, you must be able to keep your systems up and running. The next thing we look at, so, okay, that's from beginning to end. How long does it take for us to get back up and running? The next thing we look at is, okay, if it takes us on average, say, 45 minutes to get up and running, how confident are we to make changes without breaking things? The last thing, and gets into even more detail, is, okay, if this is our MTTR and this is how quickly we can recover, let's look at, okay, where is the friction to deploy our changes? Because that's what it'll come down to. If it takes 20 minutes to roll the smallest change out, What is going on there and can we make that shorter? Because we can't afford 20 minutes for every change that we may need to do for an emergency.