Charity Majors, CTO and Co-Founder, Honeycomb
DescriptionThere is a yawning gap opening up between the best and the rest -- the elite top few percent of engineering teams are making incredible gains year over year in reliability and lack of technical drag forces, while the bottom 50% are actually losing ground. And this has nothing to do with engineering ability. Take an engineer out of an elite-performing team and place them in the bottom 50%, and they become subpar too; take an engineer out of a mediocre team and embed them in an elite team, and they are pulling their weight within the year. These facts are startling and counterintuitive to us. There is no single silver bullet, but there are many obvious contributing factors, some of which have to do with culture, some with tooling, some with management, some with technical leadership. I don't think we have it all figured out as an industry by any means; but I've gotten to work on several high performing teams over the course of my career (as well as some duds) and I will share with you everything I know -- everything that went into building the team at Honeycomb, which is the highest performing team I know of (our metrics are an order of magnitude better than the elite teams category on the DORA report (
https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/devops-sre/the-2019-accelerate-state-of-devops-elite-performance-productivity-and-scaling))
Takeaways1. What are the habits of high performing teams.
2. The difference between elite teams and the bottom 50%.
3. How to upgrade your team performance.
#highperformingteams
