Engineering agility: how to scale for innovation and growth

Seemin Suleri, Vice President of Engineering at Prima, is a distinguished technology leader with extensive experience in building and guiding high-performance engineering teams. She is also a Co-founder and Director of Women in Tech Dorset. Here she talks about how engineering teams can scale for innovation while navigating the challenges of a rapidly changing technological and business landscape.

While the architecture is evolving, the tech teams are often chasing a moving goalpost because the technology and the business requirements are forever changing. In addition to this, the teams have to grapple with quick decision-making about the impact of their choices. As we all know, if crafting software is an art, no artist wants to be rushed.

At Prima, as we scaled our organisation, we came across a number of challenges. Although in hindsight, many solutions to these issues are quite obvious, the ability to see these is not that straightforward given the pace of change in the industry and the level of scaling we were hoping to achieve. This scenario is not unique to Prima. Many tech organisations go through the same path. Here are a few highlights of our approach that helped us tremendously along the way.

Think about what matters most

Understanding what matters most is not only important for the business itself, but for every individual who gets associated with it. Software architecture doesn’t evolve independent of the people who write the code. So, if you are struggling in your team and company with low performance, go and sit with your teams and figure out what is blocking them. When we did this exercise, we found a plethora of unresolved pain points. We followed up by doing a cost vs effort analysis and created a plan for getting things done. Understanding a Team Topologies view of your tech organisation helps you map out all the hidden (yet influential) communication patterns that determine how you will deliver success in your teams.

Map out your workflow

This often-overlooked exercise of visualising your workflow is the most powerful tool in an engineer’s toolkit. We ran various workshops in which we mapped out our process from the inception to delivery. We also ironed out where there were differences in our understanding and streamlined our communications. One thing to note is that this change doesn’t come quickly. You need intentional and constant action that creates wins for the teams.

Merging two souls into one

In our tech teams, we decided to remove the mentality of us vs. them. The best systems are created by working together with the business. At Prima, we work with our customers in the single team, feeling their victories and defeats, breathing the same air, fighting for the same cause. This is something not many tech companies can achieve.

In a traditional case, software teams often complain about changing requirements. It is commonly referred to as ‘scope creep’. But we ask ourselves a simple question, in the ever-changing world of software engineering, is there such a thing? We believe that tech companies need to change their thinking about how systems evolve. A change in the business climate drives the change in the needs of the systems responding to it. Therefore, we created a mentality of fluidity within our teams where creating software is deemed less of a goal post and more of a journey.

This mental shift enabled both our business teams to feel more empowered and aligned to make impactful changes fast, and our software teams to feel like the enablers of that change instead of fighting against the flow.

The only way is cross-functional

How do you cater to a multi-faceted problem? Well, you need to have a multi-faceted solution!

We discovered that often our tech teams were trying to solve problems with broad scope and varied skill needs. These needs could not be met just by specialists of one domain. We therefore, powered our engineering effort by creating teams that are truly cross-functional with both business experts and engineers pairing on tasks that deliver direct impact to the business.

We also found out that in some areas, our way of working was different. Where engineering has progressed a lot in efficiency, failing fast, innovation, etc. the traditional business teams have not. By joining forces and truly creating one soul for our business, we united the ambition and expertise of the business with the craft and the process of engineering.

We work and collaborate together to create beautiful systems that take us to the next level of competitive tech performance

Be Framework Agnostic

Many tech companies fall into the trap of following frameworks like religion. We believe that frameworks are there for a purpose and we determine what the application should be. We are framework agnostic and often combine strategies and methodologies to innovate better ways of working. The frameworks that are known in the industry should not be the limiting factor for the creativity of any team. If we really want to move the tech industry forward, we need to open up our minds, look at the problem at hand and then solve it. Instead of finding a solution and then looking for problems to apply the solution to. This approach has helped us reshape our thinking into a dynamic organisation that cannot only succeed in the trends, but also set the trends for the future.

At the heart of it all are the people. This often-overlooked facet of engineering is what we at Prima focus on the most. What the future holds for Prima – who knows! But one thing is for sure that we are excited to take our engineering practices to the next level. We innovate, we learn, and move ahead at a rapid pace. For whatever the future holds, we are ready!