Blanca Garcia Gil, former Lead Data Manager at the BBC, lost most of her team when the engineering organization failed to evolve.
At the time, the engineering team was trying to convince company leadership that they needed to migrate a legacy platform, but the migration kept getting postponed.
According to Gil, leadership and engineering were at odds. “For the organization,” Gil explained, “There wasn’t a business case to migrate away.” But the engineering team knew the costs of the legacy tech – even if they struggled to sell leadership on the benefits of updating. “This system was failing every other day of the week, and failures took days – sometimes weeks – to actually debug,” said Gil.
The challenge was two-fold: Convincing leadership that migration was worthwhile and convincing the remaining engineering team (and future hires) that the engineering organization wouldn't remain frozen in time. “It was a very hard problem to solve, and it went beyond engineering,” Gil said.
Engineering culture change is also a common challenge for leaders, in large part due to how easy it sometimes appears.
In reality, changing your organizational culture in engineering specifically is frequently harder than changing any other organization within a company.
Engineering can feel distant from business value
Back in 2021, Jeff Lawson, CEO of Twilio, tried to articulate why tech-first companies were disrupting legacy incumbents in his book Ask Your Developer. His diagnosis was that, in the past, most companies considered technology (mostly via the IT department) to be a cost center. This meant, he writes, that “They cost the company money and did not, in and of themselves, make money.”
But along came mobile, the cloud, and digital transformation writ large. The tech-first companies were winning, he writes, because “Software moved from being a cost center to the profit center.”
Every engineering leader who has tried to change the engineering organization, however, runs into the limitations of this theory:
The two-fold problem above that Gil faced emerges again and again across many different organizations. Engineering is often distant from business value, and both engineers and leaders can misunderstand each other.
Most engineers don’t think leadership knows what they do, and they’re often right – to a degree. Nontechnical leaders frequently struggle to understand the granular details of development, but it’s not a one-sided problem.
Most engineers don’t know how the discrete tasks they take on create or contribute to business value. Sales can often rattle off the revenue they’ve generated or the value of a given prospect at a moment’s notice. Ask an engineer what the latest release or the newest feature means for ARR, and they likely won’t have an answer.
As a result, engineering leaders are often caught in the large gap between engineering work and business value – unable to communicate the business value of technology or process change to business leaders and unable to translate business impact into engineering terms.
Engineering leaders don’t want to play politics
When solving engineering problems, you’re often breaking down big problems into smaller ones and addressing them piece by piece. When collaboration is necessary, the technical merits of one strategy over another matter first and foremost. Eventually, you run concurrent experiments to see which performs better, and the stronger solution speaks for itself.
Not so with engineering culture. The skills involved in leading and managing teams and departments are squishy and often unclear. You can work toward understanding them, but they tend to resist strict definition and decomposition.
Engineering leadership is more complex than many other forms of leadership because the problems involved are inherently political and sociotechnical. If you want to marshal consensus behind one framework and not another, for example, you need to have the political skill to make a compelling argument across people with different interests and the technical acumen to support your arguments. Only having the technical or the political side alone is insufficient.
For many engineers, however, political work feels distasteful. Some engineering leaders just don’t want to do it – either seeing politics as outside their role or dismissing political work as the result of stubborn higher-ups who won’t look at the technical truth.
But, as they say, just because you’re not interested in politics, it doesn’t mean politics isn’t interested in you.
If engineering is disconnected from business value, then executives will eventually start handing work down with little context for engineering leaders on how and why. Higher-ups could see a stat in a McKinsey report about the value of innovation, for example, and demand an engineering leader increase the rate of innovation without describing what that means for their company in particular, how innovation should be tracked, and how this effort should actually be accomplished.
Or, let’s say a competitor has made waves with a blog post about how they use AI, and now your higher-ups want to adopt it too. Engineers often see the issues with proposals like these right away, but the best engineering leaders know how to say yes to these requests without leading their teams off a cliff.
Engineering leaders with a political mindset can position their work and their team’s work in a way that satisfies both the higher-ups and enables the team. This “both-and” mindset is rare, but it’s the best way to work with executives without alienating your staff.
Engineering culture change requires a different skillset
The Peter principle describes how companies can promote employees, based on one skill set, into positions that don’t require that skill set. At its worst, the Peter principle is a little too cynical about management, but it contains a nugget of truth: Skills in one job don’t necessarily translate to another, and new leaders have to want to learn how to lead if they want to be effective.
This dynamic is particularly challenging for engineering leaders because the skillset change is often more dramatic than it is for other leaders.
Engineering leadership requires leaders who can:
- Cast a compelling vision.
- Convince and sell.
- Set measurable goals.
- Enable people to pursue those goals.
- Hold those people accountable to those goals.
Until they become engineering leaders, these skills are rarely required of engineers. As a result, engineering leadership can feel like jumping into the deep end – and the cold waters can trigger real anxiety.
Leadership often feels forced for people not used to it, and the discomfort can lend to feelings of imposter syndrome. This only worsens if company execs don’t offer leadership training (which they often offer to sales and marketing leaders, in contrast). This skill gap leaves engineering leaders unequipped to make change, and when they don’t know about the gap, they can feel fraudulent.
Engineers are wired to be skeptics
Engineers are taught to analyze, criticize, point out faults, and propose alternatives. Many of the best engineers systematically, persistently, and stubbornly do this for every technical problem they face.
But for engineering leaders, this habit can result in an outsized skepticism that can cause them to be dismissive instead of analytical.
The trigger for this dismissiveness is the line that separates management from management theater. Security theater is when people engage in empty shows meant to make people feel secure without actually securing them, such as when the TSA slows down air travel without improving safety. Management theater is similar.
Engineers are wired to recognize management theater (many call this having a “sensitive BS meter”). When management is all show, no substance, or when management makes ambitious announcements to change the engineering culture without committing to actually following through, engineers are often the first to call it out.
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The problem with unlearning this habit is that it’s founded on a lot of truth. Leaders – especially nontechnical ones speaking to management, even more so if they’re disconnected, as described in the first section here – tend to engage in what amounts to management theater.
Engineering leaders can, however, be overzealous with this observation because political persuasion is a necessary leadership skill – even if some leaders are all rhetoric, no substance.
Engineering leaders have to maintain a balanced skepticism to bring about change. Change in engineering can be especially hard because engineers are so skeptical of what might appear to be management theater, but engineering managers can only create change if they work with management on their own terms.
Drive engineering transformation that lasts
The Uplevel Method combines metrics and hands-on training to help teams build the skills they need for change.
Leadership requires comfort with discomfort
Changing the cultures of engineering organizations is always going to be difficult.
Gil ended up in a technical leadership position at the BBC as a few teams merged. Eventually, her core responsibility became “Getting the engineers to think about things that, otherwise, we would have missed.”
And that’s what a technical leader needs – the ability, both technical and political, to show higher-ups and engineers alike what they missed, how to see problems anew, and how to find solutions in innovation. For new engineering leaders, it can be an uncomfortable position, but the leaders who can turn that position into their comfort zone are the ones who will succeed.