Cultivating a culture of continuous improvement

Continuous improvement isn’t just a buzzword—it’s a vital part of any thriving engineering culture.

• Why it matters: Embracing continuous improvement transforms teams and organizations by enhancing productivity, quality, engagement, and adaptability.

Here’s how to foster a culture of continuous improvement:

1. Learn
   • Lead by example. Share your learning experiences. Normalize sharing and imperfection from the top down.
   • Foster curiosity. Encourage questions and exploration. Ask questions, and avoid starting with “I have a dumb question”.
   • Create a safe space. Allow room for mistakes and learning. Discuss as a group to normalize retros on personal mistakes.
2. Give feedback
   • Conduct regular reviews. This could be a code review or a general check-in.
   • Keep an open communication channel. Maintain a feedback-friendly environment. If everyone feels comfortable providing feedback, you’ll all learn from each other much faster.
   • Iterate on processes. Make incremental cultural changes. What works now may not work later. Gather feedback, test, and adjust.
3. Recognize effort
   • Celebrate successes. Acknowledge achievements, big and small. Bottom line: Cultural changes have to be incremental. If you try to change too much at once, your team will push back. This is why continuous improvement is so important; it’s an ongoing journey.

Diving deeper

We’re always looking for ways to learn, grow, and enhance our processes, and as engineering leaders, fostering this mindset can lead to significant benefits for both our teams and our company. Remember that culture is not “we’re going to do something new this week”; it’s ingrained in the everyday processes of a team or organization.

Why should we be thinking about continuous improvement?

• Enhanced productivity: If you’re constantly looking for improvements, you’ll continue to increase productivity.
• Higher quality work: Thinking beyond process, if we continue to seek opportunities to become better from a technical or deliverable perspective, we’ll produce better work.
• Increased engagement: Continuous improvement is investing in your team, and investing in your team increases their level engagement within the organization.
• Adaptability: If you’re already used to changing the way you work, when you have to change the way you work, you’re going to be much more prepared to act.

So how do we build this culture of continuous improvement? I think about continuous improvement from three angles: learning, feedback, and recognition.

Learning: One of the keys to continuous improvement is cultivating a learning mindset within your team. I talk about this topic across many of my newsletters, but to summarize for the sake of continuous improvement, I’d recommend looking into a few strategies:

• Lead by example. I talk about this all the time. Share your own learning experiences and encourage others to do the same. You know I love reading leadership books, which absolutely contribute to my practicing as an engineering leader.
• Foster curiosity. Encourage your team to ask questions and explore new ideas. You should be asking questions too. The more you move into management, the less you’ll likely be involved in the deep technical decisions your team needs to make. I learn a ton from my team in this regard.
• Create safe spaces. Ensure your team feels comfortable sharing their mistakes and learning from them. We have a section on our weekly meeting to discuss regressions for this reason. Project post-mortems are also a huge help (and a newsletter topic I’ll be covering in the coming weeks).

Feedback: Speaking of topics I never stop talking about… Feedback is absolutely critical for continuous improvement. I implement feedback loops in a few different ways:

• Regular reviews. This may be a code review or just a check-in on how a project is panning out. Just an easy check-in to get a pulse on how things are progressing without getting too in the weeds.
• Open communication. My team knows if I have feedback to give them, we’re going to talk about it. And I encourage them to do the same with me. If I’ve done something they didn’t like or they need more guidance on something, they know they can come to me and we’re going to talk about it.
• Iterative processes. Sweeping cultural changes don’t work. Provide feedback in an iterative manner and build from there. Don’t try to change everything in one go.

Recognition: Lastly, recognition and rewards play a significant role in maintaining a culture of continuous improvement. People generally like being recognized for their work, be it in public or just a private DM saying “hey, good job on delivering X project”.

• The general idea here is to celebrate successes of any size. No matter how big or small, successes are worth celebrating and being known. Some get shared at the company level in our #general channel, while others are at the #engineering level or just in our team meeting or 1:1.