How to Improve Developer Engagement!

Howdy, Upstarts!

In this series of articles, I have been explaining an important concept of Corporate Culture: Developer Engagement. So far I have covered what Developer Engagement is and why it is important, and how to measure Developer Engagement. In the first article of this series article, I defined Developer Engagement as the emotional connection that your software developers have with your technology product, and why an early-stage startup needs to cultivate Developer Engagement in its development team. Developer Engagement can help lean startups weather the tough times it will face! In the second article of this series, I took this idea further and gave you some ideas about how you can start to measure and track Developer Engagement in your startup. Now that you are measuring Developer Engagement, I will give you some tips on what to do to improve it!

There is a massive difference between knowing that you should do something and knowing how to do something! For example, I know that I should go to yoga at least three times a week, but I still look like an idiot in the Downward Dog position! In this article, I want to address that problem! I am going to give you 3 Leadership Best Practices to increase Developer Engagement and build a culture of success at your startup!

3 Golden Rules

Once you understand how important Developer Engagement is, you can do the following three things to cultivate and foster Developer Engagement in your startup.

1. Transform Boring Chores into Memorable Experiences!

2. Motivate your Developers with Personalized Growth Plans!

3. Use Tough Times to Build a Sense of Community!

Turn Chores into Experiences!

First, you should transform the boring aspects of your office into memorable experiences!

As my friends in the Marketing Department tell me: the key to marketing is to be memorable!

Every company, even the coolest, hippest startup in the world, is going to have some mandatory tasks; and, there is never going to be a way to avoid giving your developers a PowerPoint Presentations on timesheets and lectures on workplace harassment. Accept it!

But you can make these boring tasks more engaging and more memorable by using them as opportunities to evangelize your teammates and to build excitement for your startup.

I always treat my developer onboarding experience as one of the most important moments for my new developers, because their onboarding process will define their relationship with my startups! So, I design onboarding processes that encourage innovation, communication, and collaboration. I give my developers the time to learn about the core technologies and philosophies of my startup to make sure they internalize our mission. I create fun exercises to introduce them to our toolsets and processes, instead of a to-do list for setting up their coding environments. I create checkpoints and deliverables from the very first step to foster good communication habits and to build relationships with their teammates from the first minute of joining a team. All of these things contribute to a carefully designed experience!

My point is that those small tasks and chores that we often ignore are some of the most important opportunities to foster Developer Engagement!

Personal Growth is a Powerful Motivator!

Second, you should always provide personal goals and achievements for your development teams!

As Joe Exotic always says, Tigers get bored; and, that's why zookeepers spend a lot of time building toys and puzzles to keep their Tiger entertained and occupied! Developers are like tigers, they are intellectual creatures!

Every person requires challenges to grow and to learn! Without this, we all tend to slow down, lose excitement, and become bored. If your developers become bored, then you lose Developer Engagement and their work will inevitably suffer.

One of the best ways for you to reduce boredom and increase Developer Engagement is to find ways to tie the work of your startup to the personal growth of your developers!

In my personal experience, the way that I do this is to create a Personal Growth Plan for each of my developers and to make sure that my developers understand that the work they are doing is tightly coupled to their Personal Growth Plans! Junior Developers have a lot to learn, and so I know that they will need to work on tasks that are pretty un-exciting; so, I make sure when I assign them to create a new email template, that they understand that they are also learning how to integrate a third-party API, which is a critical skill for their future!

As Engineering Leaders, we should appreciate that the work we give to our developers is not only about advancing our startups, but also about advancing their careers!

Work through the Tough Times Together!

And last but not least, you should leverage struggles to build a sense of community!

You don't build strong teams with corporate retreats! Studies consistently show that the best way for people to bond is by surviving difficult situations together. I recently had a development team that was given a last-minute deadline to build a demonstration system for a customer. It was a do or die moment! The team ordered a few pizzas, worked through the night, and killed it for the demonstration the next day. The customer was blown away and we closed the deal! But, the key decision I made was to keep the entire engineer organization working late instead of only the team who were facing the deadline. I did this for two reasons. The first reason was practical, I wanted every resource available in case the team with the deadline needed help with the deliverable. But the second reason was more strategic, to use this hardship as an opportunity to form a strong bond and sense of community through shared hardship! And it worked!

Although it was difficult, this shared hardship strengthened the bonds of my developers, and I witnessed increased communication, collaboration, and appreciation between my teams!

So those tough times can be used to increase Developer Engagement and to strengthen the bonds that hold your startup together!

Culture Developer Engagement!

Developer Engagement is an important part of building a healthy Corporate Culture; but, it is one thing to say that Developer Engagement is important and an entirely different thing to cultivate and grow Developer Engagement!

In this article, I have given you three Management Tips that I hope you can use to foster Developer Engagement and strengthen your startups!