The Innovation Tax: How much are unproductive and unhappy developers costing you?
I am not someone who believes that developers should be coddled. And I don’t subscribe to a culture of entitlement for developers, or any other part of an organization for that matter, including the C-suite. We are all professional adults operating in the real world. We should treat each other like grownups, regardless of role or responsibility. From the coder to the financial analyst to the sales rep, we all bring our unique value to the company.
So execs like me need to strive to understand, appreciate, and foster the critical skills every team member brings to the table.
Let’s start with developers, one of my favorite cohorts. We’ve all heard the now overused adage of the digital age: “Every company is becoming a software company.” What this trope is trying to convey is that innovation in the digital space - application development - is a major force in driving new business creation and competitive advantage. The speed with which a new application can be deployed, coupled with the quantity of innovative features in it, is a direct lever on the success of a business.
If applications are the currency of the new economy, then development teams are the market makers. In my experience, however, despite the relentless strategic emphasis on speed and innovation in the digital economy, these teams continue to be misunderstood, mismanaged, and marginalized inside both large and small companies.
It’s not rational. Worse, it’s incredibly costly. I think about this as a tax on the amount of innovation that a company can produce. Companies pay this tax when they fail to understand the nature of the work developers do, or provide a safe and productive environment for them to do it. And if you don’t get that right, you’re not going to be in this game for very long.
Though I don’t write any production code these days, at heart, I’m still a developer. And MongoDB leads hundreds of developers spread across tens of teams, so I’m constantly exposed to developer issues. Over the course of my career, I’ve learned a few things about how – and how not – to cultivate a productive culture for developers. This will be an ongoing discussion, for sure. But to get things started, here are a few things to think about if you’re trying to reduce the “Innovation Tax” your currently paying:
Give your developers business context
Don’t insult the intelligence or maturity of your developers. They can – and must – understand the business rationale for their work. In fact, painting the strategic target for developers will result in a better work product as they align their key decisions in the architecture and design experience of your software. Once they understand the business context, they’ll find better ways of achieving it bottoms-up than any tops-down leader, even a CTO like me, possibly can.
Respect tech debt — and pay down the principal
In my experience, the single biggest source of low morale among developers is the combination of too much tech debt and management’s dismissal of it. Taking on some debt to get a release out is fine - if you do it knowingly and pay down the principal later. But leaders who don’t pay attention to mounting debt demonstrate in a very visceral way to developers that they’ve become Gantt-chart leaders, and lost touch with their ethos of engineering. Developers don’t do well with cognitive dissonance, so when you tell them to build the next great thing on top of a dumpster fire, you lose credibility, they lose patience, and your company loses money as the pace of innovation slows to a crawl.
Understand what your developers are really doing
I could talk about this one for days, but the bottom line is that if leaders don’t understand how developers spend their time, they have no business leading the teams. It’s easy to just focus on new features, but you must acknowledge and address the fact that adjacent work like maintaining databases or a legacy staging environment is pure drudgery that provides no innovation value, costs a fortune in developer time, and saps morale. Listen to the developers when they say that they need to revamp an adjacent or dependent system to understand why it’s important.
Remove OKRs and vanity metrics
Top-down innovation is an oxymoron. You have to trust that developers want nothing more than to see their work come to life. The more management tells them how to do their job – through objectives and key results or any other key performance indicators – the more they limit the scope of innovation. Paint the target, then get out of the way.
Align your goals
This goes back to providing business context. Leaders and developers need to believe they are working together toward the same goal. An oppositional relationship takes developers out of flow, and you can lose a whole day of productivity from a single negative interaction. Again, I’m not advocating coddling; developers have their part to play in the complex recipe that builds a successful company, just like everybody else. But for that to work, you must align business, technical, and organizational goals, and build honest and transparent relationships with your devs.
Like I said, I could riff on this topic for many more days (or posts). And keep in mind, mismanaging developers is just one form of innovation tax. I’ll be exploring other hidden levies in this space over the coming months. But hopefully this starter list of dos and don’ts gets the conversation going. Please feel free to add to it (or subtract from it) on Twitter at
@MarkLovesTech
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March 23, 2021