Drew Harris’ Post

Maximizing developer productivity requires creating an optimal working environment. VentureBeat discusses the three key strategies to enhance productivity: 1. Creating distraction-free workflows. 2. Hiring skilled product managers. 3. Prioritizing developer happiness. Focusing on these strategies empowers companies to create a more efficient, productive development environment, which will lead to faster innovation and a stronger competitive advantage.

Looking for a Low-Cost Dev Team? Here’s How to Get Started 💡 Struggling to balance quality and cost when building your development team? It’s a challenge many companies face, especially when trying to scale efficiently without breaking the budget. Here’s how you can lower your development costs without compromising the talent and expertise you need: 1. Embrace Flexible Staffing Models Instead of committing to full-time hires, consider #staff #augmentation. This approach allows you to bring in expert developers only when your project demands it, saving you from the overhead costs of long-term employment. It also gives you the flexibility to adjust your team size as project needs evolve. 2. Focus on Tailored Solutions Stop paying for generic software that doesn’t truly fit your needs. Custom development ensures you’re building tools and systems designed specifically for your business, cutting out unnecessary costs and wasted time on features you’ll never use. Investing in the right solution upfront saves money in the long run. 3. Streamline Your Processes Efficient development processes, like #agile methodology and automation, can significantly reduce time and costs. The faster your team works without sacrificing quality, the less you’ll need to spend on lengthy projects. Constantly refining and improving your workflow is key to maintaining a lean budget. By making smart choices about how you structure your team and projects, you can control costs without compromising the talent or innovation required for success. #DevelopmentStrategy #CostEffectiveSolutions #ScaleSmart #SoftwareDevelopment #benchsales #c2c #TechTalent #mvp

Really can't help coming back to this. Hearing more stories of the post-covid push for office returns and all the negative outcomes of forcing that. For me though, even worse is the negative consequences that are impacting remote and hybrid working. Organisations that are not pushing for office returns but instead are opting to force an 'always connected' approach. Our knowledge workers and creators now must be online constantly and reply to all questions immediately, even if mundane and non-critical? Even when we were regularly in the office we had the opportunity to break away from screens, chat with colleagues and friends, take some down time with a coffee break, think about the work we're doing and how best to do it. We need to stop asking highly capable and highly paid people to work like automatons. Not only will the products and services we build bring less value and impact, the best people will leave for organisations that empower them to do even greater things, rather than constrain their creativity. https://lnkd.in/ePNySzx5 --- 📧 Subscribe to my newsletter for thoughts, principles, practices and frameworks enabling product leadership to maximise the performance and impact of their product organisations: https://lnkd.in/e-RBDED8 #productmanagement #productleadership #productdevelopment #leadership #techleadership

If you are a business owner or a manager/director leading a team, stop overcorrecting with software. All kinds of businesses, even "non-technical" ones, are implementing too many different software systems for their size and processes. Deployed well, the right software solution should speed up your workflows and improve efficiencies. However, there is a local maximum where having too many systems in place lead to mistakes, omissions, and disruption. That all equals lost time. Review your stack; how many redundancies do your teams work in every day? Examples: Teams, Slack, iMessage, Google Chat Google Drive, Dropbox, Internal Server, AWS, iCloud Workfront, Asana, Trello, Notion, Jira, Wrike Two things happen when you have redundant software. Either teams will use the same tool for different things, or they use different tools for the same thing. This leads to a greater need for documentation and updates (time), plus it extends training and onboarding (time) for new team members and existing team members when they move around the organization. ~~~ 👋Hey there, I'm Trevor - a fractional product leader and I work with non-technical founders and businesses to build, grow, and optimize their digital systems and products. Most owners think "I don't have a digital product" but you likely operating multiple software products internally to run your business. I can help you tame that beast, bring order to the chaos, to save you time and money. ⌛💰 #ProductOps #ProductOperations #Business #Entrepreneurship #Operations #BusinessOps #BizOps #Software #ProductManagement #ProductManager

This was a great read and I couldn't agree more. It's absolutely true that happy developers are productive developers, and the key to their happiness lies in their experience and the engineering culture of the organization. From my own experience, I've seen how critical it is to have visibility on key performance indicators (KPIs) for the tools we use in our workflows. When these tools become blockers, it not only hinders our productivity but also affects our motivation. It's essential to have a system in place that allows us to monitor these KPIs and address issues as they arise. 📈 I'm particularly intrigued by the potential of Atlassian Compass to integrate these KPIs into Jira, where much of our work is organized. Having a single view for scorecards and metrics could be a game-changer for organizations. It would enable us to proactively identify and address pain points in the developer experience, leading to improved productivity and, more importantly, ✨developer joy✨. Overall, I believe that focusing on developer experience is the key to unlocking greater productivity and satisfaction among developers. It's not just about measuring productivity; it's about creating an environment where developers can thrive. 🌱 #developerexperience #developerproductivity #platformengineering

A great read. I'm particularly aligned with this idea: "Empower a platform team" - let's developers focus on what they do best - expertise and accountability focussed in one group - provides consistency across an organisation --- Step 2: Empower a platform team Platform teams are an internal group focusing on providing a great developer experience. Platform teams provide internal services to software delivery teams, enabling them to self-serve and work autonomously. These services might include infrastructure, CI/CD, monitoring and logging tools, or making it easy to understand and comply with company standards and practices. Remember that DX is about how developers feel about the tools and frameworks they use to deliver software. Centralizing these tools and frameworks under a platform team means one group is responsible for these within an organization. Logically, enabling a positive developer experience should be the primary goal for a platform team.

When Platform Teams Fail: Measuring What Matters In modern teams, especially with frameworks like #TeamTopologies, we know that teams are never static. They evolve as goals shift and new challenges emerge. And yet, there are teams that get stuck measuring success through outdated metrics. Output metrics like deployment frequency, automation coverage, and sprint velocity are all essential—but let's be honest: measuring output can become the enemy of true platform success. I've watched teams celebrate the sheer volume of work done while their platforms slowly drift into irrelevance. Behind impressive productivity numbers often lies a disconnected platform that no longer serves users' needs. Through my years working with Platform teams, I've observed how easy it is to lose sight of whether our work truly matters. We build impressive automation, deliver new features, and improve our deployment pipelines—all while potentially missing the actual outcomes our organizations need. It's like having a perfectly efficient assembly line producing things nobody wants. #TeamTopologies teaches us that teams should be designed and restructured to align with organizational objectives. When we measure success solely through output, we risk building teams that are efficient in their processes but disconnected from strategic goals. I've seen highly productive Platform teams gradually transform into isolated service factories, celebrating their efficiency while their users struggle with real challenges that remain unaddressed. The path forward lies in focusing on outcomes—our platforms' tangible impact on developer productivity and system reliability. In my experience, the most successful Platform teams measure their worth not by what they produce, but by how effectively they enable and accelerate their users. In other words, how happy users are from using platform. Let's shift our focus from celebrating output to creating meaningful outcomes. A Platform team aligned with the right goals and measures what truly matters becomes an enabler of organizational success rather than just another productive department. #SRE #PlatformEngineering #DevOps #Kubernetes

🌍 Product Ops for Distributed Teams 🌎 Once upon a time, SaaS businesses working remotely (at least for some of their departments) was just a thing. It was practical, efficient. Then the pandemic of 2020/2021 made it first necessary for many more, and then cool. At the time of writing this article, old habits around control and realisation of inadequacies are creeping back in as business leaders strive to get staff back into physical buildings under their watchful eye and able to justify their swanky (yes, there is an s in there!) and expensive office locations. Regardless of these efforts, the world of work has never been so global, so distributed, so geographically and timezone-disbursed. This presents some logistical challenges that, while present in any business, need some special attention to provide a considered and efficient working setup for your colleagues. This article outlines some of the challenges we can encounter, and the steps I have taken in my Product Ops capacity to support excellent efficiency and practicality for globally distributed businesses. Read the full article in the comments below #ProductOps #Remote

🌍 Product Ops for Distributed Teams 🌎 Once upon a time, SaaS businesses working remotely (at least for some of their departments) was just a thing. It was practical, efficient. Then the pandemic of 2020/2021 made it first necessary for many more, and then cool. At the time of writing this article, old habits around control and realisation of inadequacies are creeping back in as business leaders strive to get staff back into physical buildings under their watchful eye and able to justify their swanky (yes, there is an s in there!) and expensive office locations. Regardless of these efforts, the world of work has never been so global, so distributed, so geographically and timezone-disbursed. This presents some logistical challenges that, while present in any business, need some special attention to provide a considered and efficient working setup for your colleagues. This article outlines some of the challenges we can encounter, and the steps I have taken in my Product Ops capacity to support excellent efficiency and practicality for globally distributed businesses. Read the full article in the comments below #ProductOps #Remote

Atlassian just issued a blog post stating that 25 billion work hours are lost to ineffective collaboration each year in the Fortune 500. ... 25 billion. 😳 💰 💸 25,000,000,000. At Echoes, we strongly believe that we can help. 💪 Our latest blog dives into actionable strategies to help engineering teams regain focus, streamline workflows, and ship impactful features faster. 🚀 You should read it 😉 🔓 🔑 https://lnkd.in/eWZ8hcY2 Let us know your thoughts—how does your team manage complexity and boost delivery? #EngineeringEfficiency #TechInnovation #SoftwareDevelopment #EchoesHQ