In the pursuit of engineering efficiency, many organizations double down on delivery governance: more dashboards, more reports, more tools. Yet, paradoxically, delivery slows down.
A few years ago, at a global multi-brand corporation in the consumer sector, I witnessed this firsthand. The company was undergoing what leadership called an "efficiency transformation."
The goal? Deliver more, faster. Leadership rolled out new tooling. Dashboards tracked pull request times, deployments, and sprint velocity. A daily report landed in every executive's inbox by 9 a.m. sharp. It didn't take long for the numbers to improve. But only on paper.
On the ground, the story was different:
- Morale was plummeting while sick leaves surged
- Cycle time remained stubbornly high
- The number of incidents climbed sprint after sprint
- Top talent was walking out the door
- Engagement scores raised red flags across the board
The lesson: Efficiency in engineering is not about control. It's about how well your culture enables high-leverage work.
What Elite Teams Actually Do Differently
The DORA State of DevOps Report (Google, 2023) consistently shows that elite-performing teams share four critical traits: psychological safety, team autonomy, continuous improvement, and a focus on long-term quality over short-term throughput. These aren't byproducts of status reports. They are outcomes of intentional culture design.
Research from the same report reveals that high-performing teams deploy 208 times more frequently than low performers, have a lead time from commit to deploy that's 106 times faster, and recover from incidents 2,604 times faster. Yet none of these achievements come from more governance or stricter metrics.
In our case, visibility was optimized but flow was not. The organization had confused activity with impact, chasing metrics that missed the point:
- Story points were gamed
- Velocity became a vanity metric
- Delivery pressure led to shortcuts, not sustainable value
Meanwhile, the true productivity killers quietly compounded: technical debt, vague requirements, brittle environments, and fragmented collaboration.
The Turning Point
We took a different approach. It started with a small but powerful change: shifting our retrospectives from "Why didn't we deliver what we committed to?" to "What's slowing us down?"
With that reframing, and psychological safety in place, the team began to speak up:
- Pull requests were stuck in review for days
- The staging environment was flaky and unpredictable
- Delivery was prioritized even when requirements were unclear
- There was no time to fix recurring issues
We made a deal: for three months, we'd allocate 20% of our capacity to addressing what was within our control and escalate what wasn't.
We slowed down to speed up.
Six months later, with no headcount increase and no overtime:
- Cycle time dropped by 30%
- Engagement scores rose significantly, enough to reverse attrition trends
- Incidents dropped by more than a third over the next few sprints
- Flight risks dropped to zero
Leadership took notice. Promotions followed. The teams were energized. And users? They felt it loud and clear.
Three Principles for Sustainable Efficiency
1. Autonomy Over Bureaucracy
Teams need clarity and space, not micromanagement.
Autonomy doesn't mean chaos. It means guardrails: clear roles, clear priorities, and shared expectations that enable ownership and speed.
Research from Accelerate (Forsgren, Humble, Kim, 2018) confirms that teams with high autonomy and clear goals deliver faster and more reliably. The data shows that loosely coupled architectures and autonomous teams improve both delivery performance and organizational performance. Teams with high autonomy are 2.6 times more likely to be elite performers.
Bureaucracy kills initiative and slows execution.
2. Capabilities Over Capacity
A team delivering 40 story points per sprint isn't necessarily efficient. More headcount won't help if the system is broken.
Overloading teams leads to context-switching, rework, and burnout. What matters is how well the team can handle complexity, reduce cognitive load, and maintain flow.
This requires investment in:
- Living documentation that evolves with the system
- Stable, reproducible development environments
- Targeted tech debt remediation using hotspot analysis (as outlined in Adam Tornhill's Code as a Crime Scene)
- Clear architectural boundaries that reduce dependencies
Team Topologies (Skelton & Pais, 2019) reinforces this principle: optimize for team flow, not individual effort. Their research shows that teams operating at or above their cognitive capacity see a 50% reduction in throughput and quality.
3. Ownership and Urgency Over Seniority
A 10x engineer isn't someone who writes 10x more code. It's someone who enables 10x results for the team.
They raise risks early, propose improvements, and act like owners. High-performing teams are built not just from expertise, but from care and bias for action.
One of my most impactful teams paired high "Ability to Execute" with strong passion. The executors brought clarity and momentum. The passionate ones brought purpose and depth. Together, they fought mediocrity.
According to research from MIT Sloan Review (2022), teams with high psychological ownership deliver 23% better business outcomes and show 87% higher retention rates than teams without it.
Final Thought
Efficiency isn't about pushing features out faster. It's about enabling teams to build the right thing and sustain it.
Tools don't build great systems. People do, when equipped with the right environment.
If your best engineers are disengaged, burned out, or leaving, that's not a performance issue. It's a signal. One worth listening to before they find a place that does.
What Can Leaders Do Today?
- Allocate 20% capacity to reduce internal friction (tech debt, process pain points)
- Promote psychological safety. Make it safe to challenge, question, and experiment
- Measure outcomes, not just throughput. Ask: how does this work improve system resilience, customer experience, or developer flow?
- Escalate external blockers with data. Engineers shouldn't have to fight alone
- Celebrate and communicate wins. Culture shifts when impact is visible and recognized
Your engineering team is your strategic advantage. Treat them like it.