As an engineering manager, you’re tasked with building awesome teams. You work tirelessly to help keep projects on track, meet deadlines, and deliver results. But lately, something feels off. Your team is undoubtedly busy, even productive by conventional measures. Yet, you can’t shake the nagging feeling that all this activity isn’t translating into meaningful impact for your business or your users.

If this resonates with you, your team might be caught in a cycle of prioritizing output over outcomes. Let’s explore what this looks like from a leadership perspective and why it’s a critical issue to address.

Signs of the Problem

1. Measuring Work Alone: Your team’s success is measured primarily by output – story points completed, tickets closed, features shipped. But what about the outcomes? Are you tracking the actual value these activities bring to the business?
2. Lack of Feedback: Features are developed, shipped to production, and marked as “done.” But then… silence. There’s no mechanism in place to gather feedback on whether these features are successful or even used.
3. Team Disconnection: Your developers are “shielded” from talking to business people. You might have heard the phrase, “Don’t interrupt our precious engineers’ time.” But this protection comes at a cost – disconnection from the very problems they’re trying to solve.
4. Deadline-Driven Development: Your team is constantly working towards deadlines handed down from above. The problem? No one on the team understands where these deadlines come from or why they’re important.
5. Product Overwork: Your Product Managers are spending so much time writing detailed specifications that you’re considering hiring people whose sole job is to create detailed specs for the engineers. This level of detail might seem helpful, but it can stifle creativity and problem-solving.

The Round Corners Saga: A Case Study

Let me share a story that might hit close to home. Your team has been working on a new user interface. In a recent sprint review, you’re surprised to learn that one of your engineers spent five days ensuring text boxes had perfectly rounded corners across all browsers and devices.

Proud of their attention to detail, your developer showcases the feature. But when you speak with the product owner, you discover that the round corners weren’t even a requirement – they were just a default style in the design tool’s mockups.

Five days of a skilled developer’s time, spent on an unintended, unnecessary detail. As a manager, how do you react? More importantly, how do you prevent this from happening again?

Here’s the thing: I don’t blame the engineer. I think it’s a fundamental problem that stems from the way we’re brought up, and more broadly, from Western-based education systems.

Think about it like this:

• As a child, you have your parents telling you what to do.
• In school, your teachers tell you what to do.
• At university, your lecturers tell you what to do.

You spend the first part of your life with people telling you what to do. So it’s only natural that people find it easy to get trapped into finding the next person to tell them what to do. And usually, in dev teams that do Scrum, this becomes their Product Owner or manager.

It’s the managers responsibility to coach this out of people.

The Real Costs

This way of working comes with significant costs:

1. Strategic Misalignment: Your team’s efforts aren’t driving towards key business objectives. You’re busy, but are you moving in the right direction?
2. Opportunity Cost: Time spent on unnecessary features or misguided efforts is time not spent on innovations that could provide a real competitive advantage.
3. Talent Retention Risk: Skilled developers often leave when they feel their work lacks purpose or impact. Are you at risk of losing your best people?

Solutions: Leadership for Purpose-Driven Development

As a leader, you have the power to shift your team’s focus from output to outcomes. Here’s how:

1. Reinforce the ‘Why’: Push your engineers to ask why. Why are we building this feature? Why is it important? Why now?
2. Redefine Success Metrics: Your Product Manager should already be doing this, but they might be hiding it from the engineers, I’ve seen this many times, some Product people think by doing this it’s less distracting for the engineers, but it has a negative effect. If they’re not doing it at all, you have bigger problems, and you probably need to go higher than your team to address them.
3. Encourage Customer Connection: Break down the barriers between your developers and the users they’re building for. Teach them who they serve, the customer, and if you can introduce them to some and get them talking to them.
4. Promote Learning Loops: Make time to analyze the impact of your work after it’s shipped. What worked? What didn’t? Why? Get your engineers engaged with the Analytics data that comes out of their system, get them excited about how many users are using their new feature, and if people aren’t, ask why?
5. Cross-Team Collaboration: And I don’t just mean in formal settings. Have a beer together sometimes. Build real relationships across teams, Engineers, Design, Product and other business units.

Understanding the “Feature Factory” Phrase

The term “feature factory” vividly illustrates a development process that prioritizes output over outcomes, quantity over quality. Like workers on an assembly line, developers in this environment might be busy but disconnected from the larger purpose of their work.

As a leader, your role is to transform this factory into an innovation studio – a place where each line of code contributes to a larger vision, where your team’s skills are applied to solving real problems, not just checking off feature lists.

Moving Forward

Recognizing that your team may be stuck in this output-focused mindset is a crucial first step. The next is to start changing the conversation at all levels – with your team, with product managers, with stakeholders.

Start asking different questions in your meetings:

• “How will we measure the success of this feature?”
• “What problem are we solving for our users?”
• “If this feature succeeds, what impact will it have on our key business metrics?”

Encourage your team to think beyond the immediate task to the larger purpose. Help them see their work not as isolated features, but as integral parts of a solution that brings real value to users and the business.

Remember, you became a leader to make a difference – to guide your team to create impactful, meaningful work. Don’t let the trap of focusing on output rob you and your team of that opportunity.

Are you ready to lead the change? Your team’s potential for true innovation and impact is waiting to be unleashed.