You doubled your engineering team. You invested in better tools, and they all have an enterprise license to the latest Generative AI code assistant. Yet your delivery timelines got worse, not better. You’re not alone.
In my Free Guide to Better Retrospectives, I present a case study of the experience of a company where I worked with that was facing exactly this. A stable team, with state-of-the-art development practices, that needed to grow, and its quality and productivity slipped.
The Misleading Focus on Individual Productivity
The core problem was a common trap: they were measuring individual productivity instead of system productivity. This often happens when organisations try to scale without understanding the underlying dynamics of team collaboration. It’s a classic example of Brooks’ Law in action – “adding developers to a late software project makes it later.”
What Broke Down in the System
Several critical areas suffered as a result of this misaligned focus:
Communication Overhead: With more developers, coordination became the bottleneck, not coding speed. Think of it like trying to have a coherent conversation in a crowded room with 50 people all talking at once. The sheer number of communication paths explodes, leading to misunderstandings and delays.
Dependency Conflicts: Teams were optimising for their metrics while creating dependencies that slowed everyone else. With this, while individuals and teams can be hitting their individual targets, the overall system was gridlocked because they weren’t looking at how their work intertwined.
Context Switching: Developers were spread across too many initiatives, never reaching flow state. When you’re constantly jumping between different tasks and projects, it’s incredibly hard to focus and get deep work done. It’s like trying to juggle five balls at once – eventually, something’s going to drop.
The Metrics That Uncovered the Truth
Software is intangible, so we need the appropriate measurement to make the process visible and tangible. In this case, we needed to look at system-level metrics:
Cross-Team Dependency Count: This metric sounds complex, but it is quite easy to measure or visualise. In it simplest form, you can put tally marks in a whiteboard under the team name.
This metric conveys how many times Team A needed to wait for Team B. The metric exposes where the friction points were in their larger system.
Work-in-Progress (WIP) Limits: WIP limits can be counterintuitive, yet having too many things open at once means nothing gets delivered, and valuable time and effort are tied up. Setting up WIP limits reduces context changes and has an overall positive effect on productivity.
The Solution: Shifting to Flow-Centric Metrics
Measuring software is hard and expensive, so the solution wasn’t simply more metrics, but rather the right metrics. Project-level metrics (like Velocity) needed to be complemented with organisation-wide measurements so that the whole process became visible.
The Outcome: Sustainable Productivity
The result? Within 8 weeks, they were shipping faster than ever, with better quality and happier developers. By understanding their unique context and focusing on evidence-based solutions that addressed the system, rather than just the individual parts, we were able to achieve sustainable productivity increases.
The lesson is clear: At scale, productivity is about flow, not just individual throughput. You need to measure the system and then optimise the system. This is precisely how I help software development teams and organisations achieve continuous process improvement and sustainable productivity increases. It’s about moving beyond assumptions and implementing solutions tailored to your specific challenges.
How are you measuring productivity across your multiple teams? Are your metrics encouraging collaboration or creating silos?
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While the principles discussed here are straightforward, their effective implementation often requires a nuanced understanding of your team’s unique context. That’s where evidence-based coaching makes the difference, accelerating your journey to sustainable productivity. Let’s explore how tailored, evidence-driven strategies for visualising the flow can be applied within your organisation to achieve tangible results. Reach out today, and let’s map out the first steps towards your next level of productivity.
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