How Engineering values could help build more trust and help navigate pressure better in software teams especially amidst today's challenging and uncertain times?

In one of my past roles, we as a ‘new’ team were working on a project that was not only critical to the business but also had stringent completion timelines.

This along with a few other factors put a lot of pressure on all of us as a team & it impacted our working relationships.

Personally while working together then, based on certain behaviors I observed in my team members, I wondered if I could fully trust them.

Swanand Pagnis, a mentor who I spoke to about this shared - “I trust by default & you’ll need to earn my distrust”. This for me was deep. I started applying ‘Default to Trust’ as 1 of my values at work.

When working from Singapore(before moving to Germany), I first learnt about ‘values’ in general & how it determines how we respond to situations and also how it can genuinely serve as common language to effectively communicate and better connect with people across different cultures etc., I dug deeper & I learnt about ‘assume best intentions’ as another value back then.

Using Default to trust along with assume best intentions into my daily conversations with the team, although slowly, it started improving my working relationships with them.

Values as far as I’ve seen them as a developer in the software industry could be categorised into 3 types

• Company values
• Engineering Department values
• Team specific values(or norms)

All of this was happening in a software engineering team context & hence I refer to the above 2 values specifically as engineering values because they cater specifically towards the challenges & the related pressure we as members of a software team may face from time to time when delivering software under specific circumstances like a tight deadline, newly formed team etc.,

After experiencing the positive impact these engineering values had on me personally & my relationships within a team context, my quest to explore them further grew deeper & I found out that I was not alone.

Many #US software companies(like Asana etc.,) were already implementing them & in #Europe I’ve come across companies like Hubspot & Intercom using them too. In the companies I’ve worked so far in #Germany, to my best knowledge, I hadn’t seen this implemented yet.

Why care about having one’s engineering values defined in today’s times?

Context: The current challenging economic conditions in Europe amidst the ongoing war, rising inflation, layoffs in countries like US, Germany & in many other European countries are in their own way creating a high pressure environment for the current employees to deliver to their best abilities.

• This builds pressure on each of us to perform & in such situations especially, given that every individuals capacity to handle pressure within a team can be different, if we just remember some of these engineering values like ‘assume best intentions’ or basically giving other members a benefit of a doubt when you may observe behavior that you wouldn’t normally expect, it could go a long way in keeping a work relationship intact & it in turn helps us as a software team look out for each other more naturally.

• There is a saying, involvement leads to committment. Having these values agreed upon, written & practiced among team members builds more empathy and a better sense of belonging as well among each other, because we see each other as a human being who’s on their individual journey trying to navigate their way through their professional & personal challenges in these uncertain times and at the same time we see them as an integral part of a unit, which is one’s own team. Having this perspective and genuinely internalising it in one’s day to day in turn builds more trust with one another and this in turn builds psychological safety.

• Having these engineering values also keeps us accountable and in check and it leads to lesser situations of pressure getting the better of us because we’d have our agreed upon department and team specific engineering values that can serve as a reminder and guiding light on how we could balance relationships and strike the right kind of conversations especially when the stakes are high, just like in the current challenging times.

• I’ve personally learnt some of these engineering values the hard way in my life & I wish someone had told me about some of them earlier when I was facing some difficulties navigating some of my existing work related challenges back then especially in a high pressure work environment. The engineering values have also proven to be my saviour since then from time to time in their own way.

The Intercom’s blog on engineering values conveys this point home very well on the role engineering values play in shaping great products .

In the coming days, I intend to share more on some of these engineering values, how did I come to realise them and how using them helped me in the past navigate pressure and challenging circumstances/times better & how it continues to help me as a software dev even in these current times.

With that said, I welcome your valuable feedback on this post and if I may, I’d like to invite you to consider asking yourself/reflecting upon one question: Would you now consider defining engineering values to better equip your colleagues within a software team with ways that could help them more efficiently tackle today’s challenging and uncertain times?