It’s time for a change in software development. I say this as someone who’s been in the industry for many years, as both a founder and a developer. The way products are currently built at most companies is not working the best it should. We have all the tools required to build, deploy and run great products, but in the current ecosystem, our work has become more complicated and cluttered, slowing us down. Other departments, like sales and marketing, have tools to understand, assess, and streamline their operations — why don’t we? In order to keep software moving forward, teams everywhere need a centralized and data-driven approach to engineering.
I’ve written before on the need for a way to build software better — and in the early days at Pinpoint, we thought you could create a more streamlined engineering process top-down, by giving executives reports and analytics on how teams were doing. But what we heard from companies over and over again is that we need to start at the heart of the organization, helping the people who are actually building the products — developers. Good news is that’s pretty much all I care about — helping developers.
So here’s where we landed — on this thing that we’ve been calling Engineering Operations or EngOps. It’s about how software engineering relates to the broader business. That means tying software development to actual business outcomes by aligning and including all stakeholders, improving visibility and efficiency, and creating opportunities to collaborate.
To do this, we need to empower teams to build better software through offering clear visibility into what their teammates are working on, decluttering the dev tools they’re already using, and encouraging collaboration and empathy. With EngOps, we want to strip away the bullshit that keeps makers from making — the unnecessary meetings and ceremonies, the blockers, the jumble of dev tools, and browser tabs — to ensure developers can do what they do best, and what is best for the business.
Help the business by helping developers, first.
To clarify, EngOps is not DevOps — and I’ll write more about this in a later post. It’s also not about code analytics and disconnected report read-outs for high-level executives, though including all stakeholders — from devs to product managers to CEOs — in the software development process is one of its key parts. It’s a discipline that looks at how developers work and seeks to improve that process by removing bottlenecks and breaking down barriers between teams.
We see EngOps being the way forward for tech companies — it’s about time that we as developers have better tools for what we’re doing like sales and marketing do. We also think it will be the next big thing for the developer community overall: a way to make better software and, most importantly, enjoy the process, together.