Busting Transformation Myths

Austin Bagley

All right. Welcome to the second episode of Transformation. We're excited to have with us here Doctor Kat Hicks, a social scientist who leads the developer Success Lab here at Flow. If this is your first time joining us, Transformation is a multi episode miniseries for engineering leaders undergoing transformation, which is pretty much all of us. Two weeks ago, we had David Farah, our Field CTO and enterprise transformation expert, talk to us about how to successfully bring about change to organizations.

 

Austin Bagley

If you haven't yet, I encourage you all to watch it. We spend a lot of time talking about building the right support processes and technology resources to make transformation successful. We got into details and it was great. Today we are going to approach transformation from an entirely new perspective, but one that you'll find to be both complementary and crucial. And that's the human side.

 

Austin Bagley

Kat Hicks is a social science leader in tech, with expertise leading applied research teams to explore complex areas of human behavior, empirical intervention, and evidence Science She created the Dev Success Lab here at Pluralsight, has elevated nearly every aspect of how we approach the science of what makes developers tick outside of the lab, CAT is a research affiliate. It's Dem Education research at UC San Diego and an advocate for increasing education access. She holds a PhD in Quantitative Experimental Psychology from UC San Diego, was an inaugural fellow in UC San Diego Design Lab, and has LED research at organizations such as Google and Khan Academy. And between all of that, she also founded a company that builds tools for developers, which is super awesome. So thanks again and welcome to Transformation Cat.

 

Dr. Cat Hicks

And it's my pleasure.

 

Austin Bagley

OK, let's lay some groundwork to help everyone as we kind of get into this. You are a social scientist. What does that mean?

 

Dr. Cat Hicks

Yeah, great question. To start with, you know, I think it's exactly what you just said in this intro. We are interested in what makes people tick, and not just people, but people organized in teams, people organized in groups. So social science, it collects a lot of different disciplines. The training that I have is in psychology, but it also includes economics.

 

Dr. Cat Hicks

It includes lots and lots of other fields that come together to think about human behavior and really actionable change in human behavior. So I'm excited to be on the transformation series because social scientists were thinking about transforming human behavior all the time.

 

Austin Bagley

I love it. OK, so very related question. What is the Developer Success Lab?

 

Dr. Cat Hicks

Yeah, the Developer Success Lab is our foundational research lab, just like a science lab that you might have heard of or thought about at school. We actually have one here at plural sites. And we're called the Developer Success Lab because that is what we deeply focus on and care about. So we study all kinds of things that have to do with developer success, right? What helps to keep ICS motivated?

 

Dr. Cat Hicks

But also how can managers actually communicate about engineering work and drive change for their teams? And we do this by using social science methods. So we're not just translators. We're not just advocates. We actually are scientists in this lab.

 

Dr. Cat Hicks

We run research studies, we collect data, and we're lucky enough to get to write about them and share about them, which is my favorite thing to do in the world. So we're basically scientists being put to work to help developers.

 

Austin Bagley

So let's address the elephant in the room. You're a lab sponsored by a parent organization, Pluralsight. Does that impact your ability to do research? Like, how does it tell us how that works, just so we're all understand?

 

Dr. Cat Hicks

Yeah, of course. Does it impact our ability to do research, how we look at our research? It definitely does, but I think in some really positive ways. So I think about this research lab. You know, I'm an applied researcher.

 

Dr. Cat Hicks

I like to work. Where are the people I'm studying and working for and with where they're also working. So I think about our lab as being part of this big tradition. Where companies and, you know, you can even think about think tanks or the Department of Education or other organizations that are not a university have actually invested in a lab and a Research Center. And that's usually because we all believe that this is the kind of investment that's going to pay off for all of us, right?

 

Dr. Cat Hicks

It's going to lift up what we know about the industry. So I love to think about the Dev Success Lab as really another piece of this big family, like places like Microsoft Research. I think Adobe does some wonderful research. There's all kinds of tradition for software development, specifically in companies coming together to invest. I even think about our lab a little bit in community with open source software and places where developer communities might come together, even their companies, right, get their companies to donate into something that benefits all of us.

 

Dr. Cat Hicks

Now of course, we are employed at a company, we know that. And so we also put a lot of work into trying to be very transparent about how we work. So on all of our projects, you will see us share not just that we think something is true, but where did we learn it? Who did we learn it from? We recruit people, bring people into our studies that have nothing at all to do with our company, who volunteer to be part of it.

 

Dr. Cat Hicks

We're very transparent about our methods. And actually something I'm really proud of in the lab is we also use a lot of the methods that have been developed in academia in published research and science, and we try to share those with the industry too. So I think all of those pieces are kind of our responsibility, our duty of care to the industry to show you why you can trust us and why we are a reputable scientific source.

 

Austin Bagley

I love that. I mean, it's been a blast having this lab right here at our doorstep, you know, really up leveling everything we do. I also love just you mentioned a little bit there, which was really cool about, you know, the the, the methods that go into things and the things that we learn from you like in the first few weeks were awesome and we definitely got corrected many times on how actual research gets done. And so that was great.

 

Dr. Cat Hicks

I'm not going to jump into a methods argument, that's for sure.

 

Austin Bagley

And definitely, yeah, it's wise to take your side. So let's go into the topic at hand here. OK? You gave an incredible presentation in London a few months ago that we effectually refer to as the three myths of productivity. I wanted to unpack that here for the audience, but more importantly, dive in a bit deeper.

 

Austin Bagley

The first thing I want to talk about is this chart. So what are we seeing here?

 

Dr. Cat Hicks

You're looking at real empirical data gathered by our lab from a couple of different studies. So one of the things that you're looking at is developers. That's the orange or yellow bar. And then the blue bar is managers, 465 different managers who were in a research study that we did and 12182 developers. And what's really fun and interesting to me about this chart is these are their responses, their agreement to the question, Do you think that technical effort and work is truly being seen at your organization?

 

Dr. Cat Hicks

And immediately you can see there is misalignment here. A huge percentage of the managers when we ask this question, they say absolutely, I strongly agree. We ask this in a number of ways. We actually ask ask them also, do you think this is an important part of your job? This is a key part of your job.

 

Dr. Cat Hicks

And the managers say yes, absolutely. So that's what this large bar reflects. Developers, on the other hand, they also believe that this is very important. But when you ask them, do you think your manager has the right level of visibility into your work? Only about 24% of them say yes.

 

Dr. Cat Hicks

So this is a misalignment. And a misalignment is the kind of thing that my lab gets really excited and interested to dig further into because there are reasons these misalignments come about.

 

Austin Bagley

Yeah. I mean, I love this word misalignment and that. Yeah, obviously you can see that visually right in front of us. Why do you think that misalignment exists?

 

Dr. Cat Hicks

Well, I think that, you know, software development work is very complex and it's not getting simpler or easier. And it's clear to me that organizations are not necessarily investing enough in making sure that visibility and translation of engineering work happens. So we have a number of different ways that we've tried to study this in the lab, a number of different. Frictions that have come up from developers. One thing that we did with this particular misalignment was we dove deeply into this and did follow up qualitative interviews and focus groups to ask developers what happens when your work is not seen.

 

Dr. Cat Hicks

Like why do you think that happens? And a lot of them told us things like, you know, I haven't gotten. Invited into the conversation ever. There's a problem at this organization in standardization. So there's many, many different parts of this that we could dive into, especially from a transformation angle.

 

Austin Bagley

OK, so there's this disconnect. And this can lead to some misconstrued ideas about productivity. So what are these myths that we're talking about here?

 

Dr. Cat Hicks

Yeah, the three myths. The famous 3 myths. So I love to. I love to have this conversation with engineering leaders and and really developers across the industry. Because one thing that I have noticed as a social scientist in this area is that, you know, when we are not totally certain about what the definition of success is in our workplace, what we tend to do is we default to these myths that we hold on to about what productivity is right.

 

Dr. Cat Hicks

And I think you see this tension reflected in the arguments we have about productivity. The tension, the stress that it brings up for people, rightfully so, because if your productivity is misunderstood, you know, by the people around you, this has serious career consequences. So what I try to get across is, you know, you want to be careful about making sure your environment is not an environment where you are carrying around these myths, because that's just not how human beings work. So myth 1 is that productivity is the stuff that feels really hard. So this is when you ask developers, hey, when was the time that you worked?

 

Dr. Cat Hicks

You know, you think you worked your best and they tell you, Well, I don't know, I pulled a bunch of all nighters. So maybe that maybe that's it, right? Is it just quantity over quality, those kinds of beliefs? So myth 2 about productivity, right, Is that we think, OK, if I'm really productive? That means I never stop.

 

Dr. Cat Hicks

This is like grind culture hustle, you know, never ever stop. And in fact, you know you can hear people commit to this even at the cost of their health, at the cost of doing something better, at the cost of quality. And this is also pretty pervasive US, you know, it's when you talk to software developers. Myth 3. Myth 3 is that productivity for software developers and for software work is lonely.

 

Dr. Cat Hicks

So I think about this myth when I hear things like, you know, just let them be heads down, You know, keep your developers in the dark so they're not distracted, You know, don't distract them with the business needs. You know, I think this is a really difficult myth because it actually has some grains of truth to it when you talk.

 

Austin Bagley

I can see we're going here.

 

Dr. Cat Hicks

Yeah, when we talk about knowledge workers that we all have to focus and there is a certain important balance to be kept. For not distracting people with different kinds of work. But I think what we have have held on to for too long is the idea that the beautiful, complex software that we're going to build in the world should just be built by one person at a time. You know when that person can just do it all and that's fine? That is not the status of modern code, right?

 

Dr. Cat Hicks

Modern code is highly collaborative. You're collaborating with people across countries like yourself across time. So these beliefs that to really get good work done, you kind of have to just be alone all the time. It leads us to some pretty problematic behaviors, like not noticing or paying attention to the quality of our collaboration.

 

Austin Bagley

So I love how you've kind of talked about this with three different sides. Proctivity is hard. Proctivity is never stopping. Proctivity is lonely. I think that inherently makes sense.

 

Austin Bagley

But it's easy to get trapped to this feeling of not going to keep going. I can't stop. I've got to like got to you know, to your point grind. So what I mean, let's kind of zoom back and and and kind of think of this more from an organizational perspective like some of those things seem ideal like well, yeah, I mean it's great if my team's like, you know, not stopping and and they're like and they're focused, right. So, but, like from an organization, why should I care about these myths?

 

Dr. Cat Hicks

Yeah, yeah. And my answer to this is just try it for a while and I'll I'll tell you exactly what's gonna happen. Everything's gonna break down. Right. This is short term thinking.

 

Dr. Cat Hicks

This is something that I call brittle productivity and it's really seductive. It's really easy to think, oh, this is what it is, this is what hard work is. But the thing that we know from social science is this will break down. It will break down a lot faster than you think. And the reason for it is it cuts out lots and lots and lots of other important pieces of work.

 

Dr. Cat Hicks

Pieces of work that sustain. The quality right of your code that keep your people actually, you know, working together. And in fact, the most dangerous thing I think about this brittle productivity idea is that it can look so good. It can look really good at 1st and then people can get rewarded for perpetuating it. Hey, my team never stopped and they never stopped and they're the ones that everybody relies on and we hand them high value project after high value project.

 

Dr. Cat Hicks

You're the VP overseeing this team. You're like, all right, no problem, great. And then what do you do next week when you hear half this team quit, you know? Or maybe you thought collaboration doesn't really matter, everybody just grind yourself. It's a dog eat dog world, you know?

 

Dr. Cat Hicks

We're trying to have an elite culture, right? I've heard this from engineering organizations and then they lay off people who do architecture with the junior developers. And the people who do mentorship inside of their organization and the quality of their products falls apart, right? Because it turns out that stuff actually keeps the technical work going.

 

Austin Bagley

I love this word that you used to describe it. It definitely evokes all this imagery, this idea of brittle productivity. Yeah, And it and it works. Until it doesn't. And and it doesn't it it it goes down big.

 

Austin Bagley

I guess it's the way to describe it. So if that's why we should care about, you know, these myths and why they're not what we should be optimizing for, What is the inverse that organizations be building into the way they work with their teams?

 

Dr. Cat Hicks

Yeah, absolutely. So the model that my lab and all of our research really across many projects, we try to put forward this idea. Of resilient productivity. So resilient productivity is kind of the counterpoint to brittle productivity, right. And it really is what you want to be leaning on as, especially as an organizational leader.

 

Dr. Cat Hicks

When you try to ask yourself what is going to help me deal with all this change, you know what is going to catch the unexpected, What is going to motivate my team despite friction, right? Despite things that we never planned for in the 1st place, which I think we all experience, right? And that to me is all of the stuff that's the meat and potatoes of resilient productivity. So what we focus on is not knowing everything that's ever going to come at you, not anticipating every challenge, right? But actually asking ourselves, what are the features that we see that predict that developers stay productive and stay motivated, not in like a perfect world, but actually in the real world, right with all of its frictions?

 

Dr. Cat Hicks

So developer thriving our work on that is our first big framework which says these are the elements that Dr. Resilient productivity over time for teens.

 

Austin Bagley

I love that. I want to dive into this framework because there's so much work that has gone into this. And what's really cool for me interviewing here today is that 2 weeks ago I had David who has been through a career of large transformations. And one of the biggest surprises I learned from 2 weeks ago was this idea of team stability and how important team stability was in change, right. And which obviously doesn't like is kind of a juxtaposition if you will.

 

Austin Bagley

And now to kind of hear you talk about this idea of of you know, of resilience of of those who are like, hey, this is how we're actually going to build into the future is by having this really resilient teams that can adapt to change. And I think there's definitely some a common thread I'm seeing through this. So you mentioned the Developer Thriving Framework. So I'd love to dive into that cuz I think that's as we talk about these myths, especially the first one like productivity is hard. I think that it's such a counterpoint to that first myth.

 

Austin Bagley

And so I'd love to dive into what went into this. I mean we could spend 4 hours on this. So it's I guess we won't spend 4 hours but on the two-minute version, like what went to the study and and what is this Developer Thriving framework really even mean?

 

Dr. Cat Hicks

Yeah, let's do our best, right. OK. So you know, remember in brittle productivity we think, OK, I I don't know what's going to get me success. I guess I'll work crazy hard. You know, I'll just work to the ends of my ability.

 

Dr. Cat Hicks

And then the the immediate thing that happens is people burn out before they burn out. They make a lot of mistakes. Probably a lot of them end up in prod. So, you know, end up coming to your customers, maybe cost your company millions, if not billions of dollars. So just to drive the point home that getting this stuff right has a real tangible impact, not just on your teams, but on what you do in the world.

 

Dr. Cat Hicks

The counterpoint to this to me is don't ask yourself, you know, am I working crazy hard? Instead, ask yourself, am I doing all of these? Things, am I getting all of these things in my environment that actually will result in productivity And we know a fair bit from science about what it is that will drive long term sustainable human productivity. So the four levers, the two-minute version, the four levers, each one of these. Has a big empirical backing in the scientific literature, so scientists, social scientists, psychologists.

 

Dr. Cat Hicks

They have studied these in various different industries and workplaces. Each one predicts people's performance at work, and in our developer thriving research we replicated this as well. We find that these predict software productivity, so they are agency, learning, culture, motivation and self efficacy and support and belonging. And developer agency is, Simply put, a measure of whether developers feel like they're speaking, able to speak up in their environment. They're able to have ownership and creation as they work.

 

Dr. Cat Hicks

Learning culture is a measure of whether developers feel like they are building new skills on their teams and they are sharing it together as a team. And their team has this perspective that says. Learning actually is a part of what you do, including making mistakes and we can overcome mistakes together. Motivation and self efficacy is essentially your developers feeling highly motivated by their work. Self efficacy.

 

Dr. Cat Hicks

We call it this psychological powerhouse. It is basically like this positive self talk that you do to yourself when something very unexpected happens. So you might say, I have no idea how to solve this thing. This is a big challenge, but because I have self efficacy, I believe I am capable. I am going to go ahead and do it.

 

Dr. Cat Hicks

This is kind of what keeps us going right across the friction and finally supporting Balani. We talk a lot about this in the tech industry. We talk about psychological safety in general. I think often we want to work on this, but we don't know what to do about it or where it comes from. So we measured support and Balani in a very actionable way.

 

Dr. Cat Hicks

What is it when developers feel like they are supported? We see that they feel that they are accepted as a whole person by their teams, that someone like them is allowed to thrive here. They see people like them thriving in their environment. So we've looked at each one of these four things and measured them on software teams.

 

Austin Bagley

And so I I love that. So you took, you compiled these four things based on so much human research and then it's how does it actually develop, you know? Apply to developers and so we're not gonna drain everything here cuz it would be way too much fun but I think there's like 1 chart that'd be fun to kind of talk about. Well there's gonna be lots of charts but like 1 to start with and that's this one. So tell me.

 

Austin Bagley

I love how you went. You built this idea, this concept, and you went and tested it and this is. Some of the result of the of that testing talk more about what what are we seeing here.

 

Dr. Cat Hicks

Absolutely what you're looking at here is data that's that is from those 12182 developers that were part of our developer thriving research. So on the side here you see developer thriving that is an aggregate score like an index. So when you ask them all of these questions about agency learning, support and Balani, right, we get a score for them. Basically how strongly do you have developer thriving in your environment? And then we asked them about how productive they think they were able to be in this.

 

Dr. Cat Hicks

In this particular study we asked them over the last month because people are pretty reliable, pretty great at answering that question for the last month. And so something I love about this chart, you know, we all know productivity is complicated. It just is. It's affected by a lot of things. So it's affected by how productive you feel today, how productive you're able to be.

 

Dr. Cat Hicks

It's affected by how much sleep you've got. It's affected by whether you had your favorite coffee and it's affected by major life things that your manager has no control over, right. So things like, hey, I'm going through something really big, we know that. But what is really exciting to us is just by asking these questions and developer thriving, we are able to predict a statistically significant amount of the variance in people's productivity. So that is a powerful thing to be able to do.

 

Dr. Cat Hicks

Like it's so cheap and easy honestly to ask, can you speak up at a meeting you know, are you supported on your team? Are you getting to learn? It is kind of amazing to me that you can predict this large amount of the variance of productivity just by getting that one kind of measure. Now to me as a social scientist, again, kind of giving you the tricks of the trade here we look at things like this and we say, oh, you can have to pay attention to this because this could be what we call a lever, something for you when you don't have very much time, you don't have very much money, you know, whatever it is, we see that this is a powerful effect. It's large enough to matter when you have a limited amount of things that you can do to help people.

 

Austin Bagley

Love because we talked about levers last time and we talked about them in a very, very simple sense. But now we're getting to the science behind what a lever actually is, which is.

 

Dr. Cat Hicks

I can move something very little over here and it's going to have a big impact over here. That's exactly right. That's exactly right. And in social science, you know, you're always thinking about human beings are living complicated lives over time, like everything that we might change in our environment could lead to big or small changes later. So to me, I'm always asking myself, am I giving people the absolute best bang for their butt curly in the recommendation I make for what they should pay attention to?

 

Austin Bagley

Let's talk about the 2nd myth, Productivity is never stopping. One chart certainly caught my eye, and that is this one right here.

 

Dr. Cat Hicks

And let's talk a little bit about, like, why productivity is never stopping is an absolute myth, yes. So one of my favorite ways to come at what I think is a destructive myth in software engineering is to go out and find people who are really good at what they do and ask what they're doing. And if they're not doing, if they're not, you know, doing the thing that the myth suggests, then you can guarantee we have something to learn. So what this chart is summarizing is one question that I asked on a research study that we had of 465 different engineering managers and and leaders and managers, actually a small group of leaders in there too. And these were folks who had significant experience managing teams, who told us, you know I've I've been successful at driving change.

 

Dr. Cat Hicks

We actually collected a lot of examples from them of times that they successfully implemented change. So one of the things that I wanted to do was ask them, you know, is there is when you look at your team working, we gave them like a hypothetical scenario of a team and we said how would you assess whether there's a red flag on the software project that this team is focusing on and what would you do if you think there was one. So you know the, the brittle productivity way of thinking would have you say, you know, I'm just going to come down really hard on the team. It's probably their failure, right? Let's, let's go harder, let's work more.

 

Dr. Cat Hicks

And so we were curious, would these engineering managers say, you know, the biggest red flags are people not working hard, people not putting in enough hours. I, you know, the the level of commits has gone down like those kinds of things that we might hear tossed around that is not what these effective leaders and managers say. Instead they say 1, we're going to look at the project timeline, we're going to look at the project requirements. We're going to look maybe at the technical skill sets on the team. Well, we're going to do that in order to create learning opportunities for these folks.

 

Dr. Cat Hicks

That's what people told me afterwards. So this is a little bit of a color quote coded jumble of colors here, but I'll interpret it for you. What they, what we had people do was rank each one of these different red flags. And so you see at the top the ones with the largest amount of red. Those are the biggest red flags basically.

 

Dr. Cat Hicks

And we don't see things like developers are not hustling hard enough and they're not, you know, grinding on the weekends. Instead, we see this deeply reflective process that managers say we should go through. And when we asked them and follow up, hey, you know, what would you do? Would you stop? Would you make a change?

 

Dr. Cat Hicks

They said absolutely. We stop the grind all the time so that we can do things like fix these project timelines, fix these badly defined project requirements, and save us a lot of pain in the future by doing that.

 

Austin Bagley

I I love looking at this chart and seeing these top four here. You know, inappropriate project timeline, unclear project requirements, lack of technical skill sets. And to me it comes down to this, you know, very clear misalignment of expectations between, you know, those who need the work done versus those doing the work. And I think what's really cool about this is that you're tackling this from a research perspective. So what's really interesting is how much of this is also supported by the data coming right out of flow.

 

Austin Bagley

So one of our simplest but most powerful metrics is 1 called coding days. It's simply for each engineer, how many days had a code commit. We built it because we knew organizations had a tendency to soak up time and made it hard for engineers to get in and actually do what they love to do, which is craft great code. And so we built it and we discovered a couple of things. First off, we were right.

 

Austin Bagley

Organizations often get in the way and doing some simple things can help give time back to engineers. But the other thing that really surprised us is when we discovered the magic number was not four or five. The magic number was 3.3 and and so that was like as we took that back, it's like hey, a good productive team is not coding every single day because there's so much other stuff that matters to. Building a great software product and I love how that kind of really goes along with the data you're showing here. Whereas you need to have the right expectations going into this.

 

Dr. Cat Hicks

Yeah, you know, I think that really effective managers, I see them thinking about how do I make that time that when my developer sits down to write code which is so valuable and you know, code is expensive, it's hard, it's hard to do right. And so how do I make sure they're writing the best code, the best possible value out of that time? And so good planning comes into that. You know, good collaboration, the right support. You know, I think that at this point, hopefully we've all learned things will kind of fall apart if the developers never talk to anybody and are just sitting alone in the dark.

 

Austin Bagley

Which puts us to the last point, perfectly so. The last myth is productivity is lonely. So let's talk more about that one.

 

Dr. Cat Hicks

You know, social scientists were interested in the social. We want to think about systems. We want to think about organizations, not just individuals. So we had done all of this work, this great work to understand thriving and the four levers, you know, of the developer thriving framework. And it was all kind of about the individual software team, which is really important, right?

 

Dr. Cat Hicks

And the manager who's helping that team thrive. But there's more to the picture, right? There's also the whole organization around developers. So one of the things that we did was we we created a measure that we called the software work of visibility and value scale. So we actually, you know, pulling again as we do best from empirical measures.

 

Dr. Cat Hicks

We created a software team specific version of this where we asked developers, do I feel like my technical work is valued and do I feel like it's being seen in the right ways. So remember or cast your mind back to that first misalignment chart, right. This is where some of that data comes from, and when we map visibility in a software development organization, we cut an incredibly strong relationship with thriving, right? How much you feel like you can thrive on your team is basically unlocked or blocked. There's a barrier between you and thriving.

 

Dr. Cat Hicks

You can think of it if you're you think, well, I could do my the best work of my career here, but is my organization even going to see it? Is anyone outside of this team even going to care? These are large expectations we carry around with this, and they're incredibly important. We also find that this visibility lever, if you call it that, actually predicts productivity all by itself. So it's a way to help teams increase their thriving, but it's also a way to help them increase their productivity.

 

Dr. Cat Hicks

We think that this is a really important and cool intervention point, a piece for leaders to pay more attention to it, really.

 

Austin Bagley

I mean, I've been surprised by the number of times when we've relayed feedback back from a customer, hey, customer love this or this really made a big impact here And the developer saying I had no idea. And so that that really like lands with me in terms of you actually need to be able to see that your work is having impact and we often assume that that comes naturally. It does not come naturally.

 

Dr. Cat Hicks

I think that's so true. I, you know, I mentioned this in my talk that I there was a really powerful example a developer shared with us in our qualitative interviews where they said, hey, you know, one time I had this manager, they brought me along to a demo and I was the developer who created the demo, right, That the customer was then going to engage with and no one had ever put me in front of a customer, ever. And all that happened was I was there kind of, you know, sitting in the meeting, and then the customer loved the demo. And my manager had this moment where they turned to me and they said this person built that right. I think that software developers, as you've said, they love to craft.

 

Dr. Cat Hicks

They're builders. They're makers and builders and makers want to see their work used by people, right? And we live in this big complicated world and CODIS abstract, right? But we are human beings creating these beautiful pieces of technology that run the world. So I think that they deserve this visibility, they deserve this value, and we see the power of how much it matters in our data.

 

Austin Bagley

What's really great about this is you put these like incredible themes around all this immense amount of research, and so you can see this kind of come together, right? So we go from the left here. Productivity is hard. Well, it's actually now it's more about building a thriving, you know, culture and a thriving framework for how engineers approach their work. Productivity is never stopping.

 

Austin Bagley

No, it's actually a lot of stopping. And it's a lot of adapting and sustainable practices building into what looks like a healthy way of doing work. And the last thing is productivity is collaborative. And what's really cool about the way the story you just described is that all of your research is like based on just hours and hours and hours of interviews and stories. And so I think this is a good time.

 

Austin Bagley

We've talked about these themes, these principles. Let's let's like dive into some of the specifics here because I think we go back to this idea of a lever. Like, what are some of those levers, some specific ideas that that engineering leaders can start doing on Monday to help them make these changes and impacts on their team?

 

Dr. Cat Hicks

Yeah, absolutely. So let's let's use the dev thriving framework to stay organized because we have a lot of recommendations out of this research. So let's say you really want to increase support in Balani. OK, That's the lever that you want to choose. Some things that we see making a huge difference here.

 

Dr. Cat Hicks

Have your team celebrate the unexpected, right? We all spend a lot of time celebrating big projects, but somebody steps up and they do something in a way you didn't expect you didn't plan for. Celebrate it. That will increase belonging when teams and organizations support diversity, when they put different types of people and different types of backgrounds. And give those voices a platform inside your engineering org on technical topics, right?

 

Dr. Cat Hicks

Not just for the organization at large. That raises support and belonging, of course, for the diverse workforce of the future on agency developer agencies. So as a reminder, that's when developers feel like they speak up, they take ownership. You know, they're drivers of their work. We hear things like, hey, when my organization supports a developer driven initiative, like maybe we all rally together and we say listen, we need a code cleanup.

 

Dr. Cat Hicks

We need a moment, right? We need a tech debt moment So when leaders can support that kind of initiative, can really kind of listen and hear that and support it from their developers. I'll tell you, it pays off probably for years in an organization, right? Motivation and self efficacy is actually a place where managers play such a enormous role. So some ways that we know that managers can boost motivation, you know, work on not assigning massive, vague, abstract tasks.

 

Dr. Cat Hicks

People get motivated when they have goals broken down, when they have easy wins that come earlier in the process. So your developers need this, right? Even if they're not telling you they need those first wins, they need the task, breaking down all of those good practices. And finally, on learning culture, I have so many recs here, I'll try to limit myself. As Austin knows, I love the learning culture.

 

Dr. Cat Hicks

I say here's where code review practices can play a starring role. You know, think about the, as you said, reliability, stability, cadence. A lot of people think, of course we all care about learning here, we're all doing it. But they might actually have. The first thing that ever gets cut for your team is learning time.

 

Dr. Cat Hicks

You know, the first thing that gets cut is pair programming. That sends people a very difficult message. So if you can be kind of a learning champion for your team, I would say that goes far for people. I would also say that building in explicitly a learning time cost. You know, don't act like it's going to be magic time for someone to upskill and maybe a gift for a get.

 

Dr. Cat Hicks

If you're a manager here, say yes, we will do this complex difficult work. Yes, we will work hard right now and because of that please give us an extra week of learning time that we're going to commit to as a team level goal. In that way, organizations can really supercharge their learning culture here.

 

Austin Bagley

I love it and almost every single example you shared is something that I've also seen from teams and actually in the flow data, which is like so cool to actually kind of. 1st come across this like one. A good example is we had a example from an engineer who is using flow was constantly running up into a lot of tech debt issues and it was bogging them down and so they said hey look at what the data shows. We're working on a lot of tech debt, a lot of legacy refactoring in flow. It's a report called Project Timeline for those who are interested and we need time.

 

Austin Bagley

To go clean up stuff like stop giving us new things, we got to have time to go and actually fix some things and they did. And that by showing the data like this is what our day looks like because of all what's going on. They're able to say, hey let's go take the time, we did it and now we're this much more productive because of it. So you're tackling this site, this, all of these problems from like a human culture and human like behavior perspective. But the underlying truth is all this is inherently tied on just to our perception of productivity.

 

Austin Bagley

But actual productivity as measured objectively. And so I think seeing this together, like, like, is really, really cool for me.

 

Dr. Cat Hicks

Yeah, I agree. So, so strongly. We're all like measurement nerds here, right? We just love to see where the evidence of how our work works and connect it both to our human outcomes and our work in the world, right?

 

Austin Bagley

Yeah, absolutely. So thank you, Cat. This has been a wonderful conversation. For those of you who are probably aware, we have multiple episodes coming up. We have four more to go.

 

Austin Bagley

There's going to be a lot of those episodes which are going to tie back to everything we learned here today, and so I encourage you to come. One in particular I'll call out is with our friends at Manulife, who'll be talking about how to advocate for engineering with data and if you feel like you need help to accomplish these things that Cat just talked about. If you need the time and space or the OR the proof, this is going to work. They're going to be experts at actually showing you how that actually goes into play at a large enterprise. And so we're very, very excited for the rest of our guests to come and join us.

 

Austin Bagley

In the meantime, love to stick around and answer any questions you have and we'll go to that point. All right. So that concludes the the main portion here with Kat and we're so excited to have her join us for this series of transformation. Had a number of really good questions come in. When I answered those quickly, one of the big questions was how do I learn more about the research you guys were talking about?

 

Austin Bagley

That's really easy. So you go to a place called Dev successlab.com where we have all of Kat and her team's research posted. We have a couple white papers and things if you want to go through quickly. We also have the full length reports which are really good contextual reads. Another question that came in that was really good is any comments on the correlation between dysfunctional communication and the more highly ranked red flags.

 

Austin Bagley

So if you go back to the presentation, that's where we asked good managers what red flags were. You saw a lot of like unclear project requirements, you know, poor time communication, you know, ranking near the top. I think Scott's like really like on the on the point here in terms of there's definitely a strong correlation between dysfunctional communication and often from what I've seen you know looking at the data is a dysfunctional you know communication often comes from a place of low context. I'm not fully aware of what's going on at team. I'm not fully aware of of everything I need to be advocating for.

 

Austin Bagley

And so that leads to some as a word, we used a lot, which is misalignment across teams. And so one of the things I think you know as we and actually there's a number of things in the paper that you can dive into as well to talk about that. But one of the big things that I'm sensing from a theme from Cat is this ability to let's actually dive into what's happening, let's communicate both ways. And then one of the cool things from Flow is that I can go and advocate for my team using objective data. We talked about the story of, you know, advocating for a code cleanup.

 

Austin Bagley

We talked about how coding days actually tend to be really good when it's 3.3. A couple other stories that I love are, you know, looking at something we call slack time, which is do I have enough time built into my overall process to get work through the system quickly? And so having these things gives you the ability to teach your stakeholders what to expect when it comes to how productivity works. And I think that tends to fix both thread flags as well as improve communication. So great question there.

 

Austin Bagley

The last question I had that we we captured from everything was what's coming next for Kat and her team and so that I'm happy to talk about. So we have a couple of things on the near road map would love to have everyone interact with in the near future. One is a productivity series they're working on diving into more from the engineering leadership side, the research that goes into building productive teams. And the second thing that I'm super excited about is a work we're calling the new developer that's talking all about artificial intelligence and the real impact it has on team strategies and individual engineers going forward. So excited to hear from that.

 

Austin Bagley

So if you want to continue to learn more, get those updates as they come through. Again, the place to go is developer successlab.com. So that's it for today. Thank you so much for attending. We're excited to have our next episode with Charlie Mode at Cells Loft in two weeks and we will see you then.