How to Get 3X the Value From Your Software Engineers

Whether you're still trying to establish product market fit, or you're looking to expand your customer base, one of the biggest levers you'll pull to move your company forward will be your engineering team.

At DRYCodeWorks, we bring FAANG-level insights and solutions to businesses that don't yet attract industry leading talent. Having worked through many stages of our clients' startup journeys, we've honed in on three areas of the software development lifecycle that set companies like Google / Microsoft / Apple apart and allow their engineers to produce products 10x, 100x, or even 1000x faster than their competitors.

3 Components of Highly Effective Engineering Orgs

Developer Experience

Time and again we see that happy software engineers make for more productive software engineers. Desirable software engineering roles have been reported to come from:

Simple, easy-to-use systems for testing and releasing feature code
Reliable observability and monitoring
Self-healing application architectures that require little to no developer intervention
Competitive salaries which reflect the high ROI on engineering efforts

Engineers want to be writing feature code for your customers. By establishing systems that make it easier to put features in front of your customers, you can create a virtuous cycle that improves the output of your software development team.

Feature Development Pipeline

Companies need to build the right thing, the right way, at the right time in order to compete in their target market. Strategies that facilitate getting this process right include:

Defining a user-interview to feature-development pipeline
Creating sandboxed environments for employees to safely build familiarity with the product
Allowing teams (both technical and non-technical) to pull levers and assess the customer experience

Intellectual Property Assets

Savvy business owners try hard to right-size their investments. A software product serves as a collection of ever-appreciating assets that drive revenue and make up a large part of some company's exit valuations. Many of these assets are overlooked by startup owners, as they exist on the periphery of the flaship product. These are the tools and infrastructure components that help software engineers build and change features, monitor user behavior and application health, rapidly and safely deploy, etc.

A typical, high functioning software company will include among its assets:

A comprehensive suite of tests
Version Controlled Database Schemas
Infrastrucure as Code
Documentation of how to Contribute, Test, Run, and Deploy

Conceptually, these are simple additions to your existing teams software development process, but they often come with deep technical challenges that don't have a one-size fits all solution. We at DRYCodeWorks try to help our customers build a comprehensive strategy for hardening their intellectual property assets through our technical audit process.

Is Now the Right Time for Changes in Your Business

Unless your product is pre-launch, or you've yet to establish product market fit, there should always be room to consider your systems. Here are a few red flags we see from some of our best fit clients:

Has your product begun to degrade since you brought on your first group of customers?
Are you experiencing downtime?
Are engineers taking longer to push out features than they did three months, six months, or a year ago?
Do you have a "release schedule" instead of allowing engineers to release at any time?
Have you been impacted by a security incident, or a cloud provider outage in the last 12 months?
Are your engineers spending more time on operational tasks than they are on feature development?

If you aren't sure about the answer to any of these questions, our comprehensive technical audit might be for you. At a time when software engineers are in high demand, we want to help you enable your engineers to bring as much value as possible to your company.

To gain more insight into whether or not now is the time to invest in your engineering systems schedule a technical audit with us. We'll help you determine what areas of focus will have the highest impact on your business, so you can strategically invest in those areas.