Do *you* know how to make your team productive?

Do *you* know how to make your team productive?
I sure as hell don’t.
Mind you, I know any number of ways to decrease productivity. Some of them are ludicrously obvious (open-plan offices, daily all-hands, audible Slack notifications), and some, not so much (poor air quality, working through breaks).
(I mean yeah, if you want to go down the “you increase productivity by removing things that decrease productivity” route, well, yes, I’ve got ideas. But that’s already pretty meta, and not quite the direction I’m going in.)

See, the problem starts when you get down and dirty, and start trying to figure out what exactly it is that you mean by “productivity”. We ourselves are quite to blame here — once we realized that making decisions without data was prone to error (who would-a thunk it?), we started measuring everything. That’s been A Good Thing for a lot of stuff (Instrumentation, Observability, etc.), but it’s also caused no end of issues thanks to Measurement Bias. (Basically, we measure the heck out of things that we canmeasure, and have gaps — or worse, ignore! — the things that are hard.)

With quantifiable items — scalability, cpu usage etc — this isn’t all that bad. You can get a pretty good idea of where the gaps are, and work your way through them, through redesign, estimation, and whatnot.

Unfortunately, the measurement of soft skills and capabilities in the workplace is hard, if not impossible. Whats worse is that many of these soft skills, especially those around the complexities associated with communication and collaboration are the dominant factor in the productivity — and success! — of software teams. Most places, OTOH, don’t even have the language to identify these skills, let alone discuss and/or improve them 😡.

Worst of all — as an industry (and thanks in no small part to #CowboyDeveloper culture), we have all bought into the mythos of the 10x engineer— even if we don’t really know what one actually is! Heck, odds are that what when we say “10x engineer”, we actually mean a “10x team”.
(And yes, this is exactly where you should inject a metaphor about Basketball, and how Jordan/LeBron didn’t start winning championships till they had a good team around them.)

We need to change this. We need to build out tooling to support these soft-skills — things that reduce friction, improve communication and collaboration, promote teachability and learnability, encourage humility and inquisitiveness, and oh so much more.

I don’t know what these are, but what I do know is that our current tools either don’t support them, or have very poor defaults that promote the opposite (yes Slack, I’m looking at you).
This shouldn’t be hard to do, it should be something that everybody promotes — a “benefit of the commons” as it were…