Top Tips for Optimizing Efficiency Across Your Engineering Team
Engineering teams have adopted solutions to not only optimize products and services but also enhance internal operations.
The technology industry has rapidly evolved and innovated post-COVID in many ways – all to focus on making our (remote) lives relatively easy. In this article, Ankur Pal, Senior Director of Engineering, Earnin, takes a closer look at new workflows and processes organizations can implement in 2022 to optimize efficiency within their engineering teams.
Engineering teams have adopted solutions to not only optimize products and services but also to enhance internal operations, like the adoption of offline collaboration tools to streamline communication and remote device farms to test products. In a quickly evolving world, the quicker we adapt, adopt and act, the more beneficial it is for us as individuals and our organizations. Let’s look at four actionable tips to help engineering teams on this journey.
Four Tips for High-efficiency Engineering Teams
1. Test-and-Learn
In 2021, most companies looked internally to revamp their business plans and analyze their go-to-market strategies for 2022. Some companies found themselves updating solutions based on shifting customer preferences that emerged from the pandemic. These types of updates not only pose challenges from an engineering perspective, but they also can hinder the company’s bottom-line if not performed efficiently. Innovating solutions with this customer-centric lens requires a test and learn approach to experiment with new product features and apply variations based on initial customer reactions.
Startups, in particular, benefit from this test-and-learn culture. This testing, measuring, and learning cycle creates a solid foundation for the engineering team to remove their personal biases from product development and focus more on customer feedback. When adopting this practice, companies ensure that any significant investments in their platform center mainly on the customer perspective, meaning they’ll likely be well-received upon hitting the market. This data-driven approach allows for more efficient utilization of resources overall.
2. Be Cloud-first
A visible trend being adopted by companies this year is pivoting to become cloud-first organizations with no dependency on data centers. Gartner’s report on top strategic technology trends for 2022 highlights the leading innovation multipliers and how they’ll take a more prominent role in the years to come. This includes cloud-native platforms which can support the development and deployment of resilient, elastic and agile systems within organizations.
The benefits of cloud adoption enable cost savings and provide organizations with the ability to speed up the pace of innovation, scale rapidly with ease, quickly access their data, and experience overall improved collaboration and efficiency. Investing in cloud-native platforms in addition to state-of-the-art tools for app development, provisioning, runtime and orchestration can help organizations, startups, in particular, improve the resiliency of their systems and achieve greater business agility.
See More: The Role of Cloud Data Lake Platforms in Enabling TCO Optimization
3. Go Native
Native > Cross-Platform. While the technology industry is witnessing an uptick in cross-platform application development, native app development is still best for mobile-first organizations.
Known as the gold standard of mobile development, native apps are more secure and interactive to elevate user satisfaction. While there is quite a bit of overhead – both organizational and operational – to maintain two native platforms, there is no substitute to native applications when looking for ways to create a streamlined and engaging user experience, especially on large scale, complex and immersive applications.
4. Leverage the Software Development Model
To keep up the momentum, consider moving to a microservice architecture to develop applications as it comes with various advantages such as increased scalability, more security and improved agility.
Organizations must also shift to agile development to boost the software development process or lifecycle. It’s important to note that smaller release cycles for product rollouts can allow your organization to be more agile and flexible in reacting to specifics and “course correcting” as needed.
Engineering Success
With the talent scarcity making it harder to recruit the ideal tech talent, it becomes more important to establish the right workflows to enhance operations and empower your engineers to create leading-edge solutions that strengthen your brand.
MORE ON OPTIMIZING IT EFFICIENCY:
- How to Optimize IT With Centralized Log Management
- Life on the Edge: Solving the Optimization Problem
- Future-Proofing Enterprises: Building Resiliency With Efficiency in Mind
- Why Intelligent Automation, And Not AI Drives Contact Center Efficiency
- Rise of “Efficiency Tech”: Build a Winning WFA Strategy With Automation
