Hey,
I have the pleasure to work with clients from Mumbai to San Francisco and from Oslo to Cape Town. And this has recently provided me with telling insights about how their companies are planning to react to the upcoming crisis.Â
To start with, not all regions of the world have been hit the same way (and some haven’t been hit yet at all). While I saw European engineering managers in tears fearing lay-offs in January, US teams are starting to be careful but aren’t there yet. One CIO told me yesterday that she “believes there is a new pattern where EMEA is hit by a crisis and the US follows with around 4 months delay”.Â
It is definitely true that “all economic warning lights are flashing red”. The dip is coming. The question is when. My gut feeling is that Q3, Q4 and Q1 23 will be very tough in EMEA, Africa and APAC and the US will face tougher times in Q1, Q2 and Q3.Â
So far so (not) good, but the more interesting question is how the situation for us as engineering/platform teams change. How are C-Level reacting to the dark clouds? Are they contracting budgets? Are they cutting jobs? Where are they investing if at all?Â
I’m observing two key strategic approaches: blind fear and cautionary responsibility. The former can irreversibly destroy the culture and productivity of an engineering team forever. The latter can actually improve both substantially. Winning teams are formed in times of crisis.Â
Explaining the blind fear approach is intuitive: managers just start freezing everything and worst case start firing. No investment in improving productivity and workflows. No communication that takes the team along and articulates “we need to unite and pull in one direction to beat the crisis together”. These teams are doomed to fail. It’s been proven for years that teams at the top quartile of developer velocity outperform other orgs 4-5X in terms of revenue growth. Meaning if you innovate fast, you grow fast in revenue. You beat the crisis. It's simple.Â
So if I talk to managers I always have the same playbook:Â
- Communicate clearly and appeal to the fighting spirit of your people. You have no idea how much everybody is ready to chip in when they have to save their jobs. Many people that I managed through the last crisis have said this was the most fun time of their career.Â
- Yes, halt new hires, everybody understands where you’re coming from.Â
- Double down on improving developer velocity. To do this for once follow Gartner and jump on the Platform Engineering train. It’s one of their top strategic technology trends for 2023 for a reason. PE by now has established itself as a proven methodology to identify and erase unproductive bottlenecks.Â
- Invest in tools to keep maintenance low, de-risk implementation and get things into place fast. If it takes you 6 months to get something in place you might be dead by the time it’s up and running. In our latest study which we are about to publish we found that 93% of the top performing teams enabled developer self-service with internal platform tooling like an IDP to accelerate innovation cycles for faster time to market.
It’s a tough call but one that can cost you a lot if you get it wrong. If you need help or want to talk I’d be happy to. Good luck in the next few weeks. Managing the good times is easy. War-time management is what separates you from the pack.Â
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BestÂ
KasparÂ
