I think companies often assume everyone already has all the core job skills they need or that they can just pick them up on the job. But technologies and practices change quickly, and good training can be a shortcut to level up skills that would take a long time to acquire on the job.
“We’ve cut scope as much as we can, but the team still isn’t fast enough.” Sound familiar? In this episode, Richard and Peter reveal what actually makes teams faster—and it’s probably not what you think. Learn the three key levers that influence team speed, common pitfalls to avoid, and practical steps you can take to sustainably increase your team’s capacity. Perfect for engineering leaders, product managers, and anyone responsible for team performance.
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Episode transcription
Richard Lawrence
Have you ever felt like your team just isn’t moving fast enough? Maybe you’ve gotten really good at focusing your work and cutting scope, but you still need more output. In our recent episode on deadlines and Agile, we talked about dealing with deadlines mostly by adjusting scope. Today, we’re tackling the other side of that equation: Can teams actually get faster?
Peter Green
This is a question we hear a lot from leaders who’ve mastered scope management and even ones that haven’t, but they still feel pressure to deliver more. The good news is yes, teams can get faster—but probably not the way you think. In this episode, we’ll share what works to help your teams go faster than you thought they could. But first, a quick reminder that the Humanizing Work show is a free resource sponsored by the Humanizing Work company, where we help organizations get better at leadership, product management, and collaboration. Visit the contact page on our website, humanizingwork.com, and schedule a conversation with us if your organization wants to see stronger results in those areas.
Richard
In our recent episode about deadlines, we treated team velocity—their speed, their capacity—as a fixed constraint. We focused on what’s possible within that constraint and how to adjust scope to maximize value.
And I think that’s the right place to start. By the way, if you want to level up your skills around slicing and focusing your work, check out our self-guided online course on the topic, 80/20 Product Backlog Refinement. It’s about how to find and focus on value at every level of your backlog.
But assuming you’ve done all that work to focus and slice effectively, and it still feels slower than you want, what do you do?
I run into this with clients from time to time, where I have the sense that we’ve sliced their work really thin—like to the sort of level where past teams I’ve been on would have targeted that as small enough—wouldn’t have sliced further but someone will object, “There’s no way we could get that done in a sprint. That’s several sprints worth of work.” For whatever reason, their teams are going relatively slower than I’d expect.
Peter
This is where our “three jobs” model for leaders becomes really useful. Remember, in an.empowered organization, leaders have three key jobs:
- Create Clarity
- Increase Capability
- Improve the System
When we talk about focusing work and getting that 80/20, we’re mainly working on Job #1: Create Clarity. But if you want to make a team faster, you need to look at the other two jobs as well.
Richard
Let’s start by looking at increasing capability. There’s something counterintuitive about many capability-building activities because they actually slow you down in the short term. It reminds me of working on my property—I have this manual brush cutter, that I recently got, basically a blade on the end of like a heavy hockey-stick-like handle. It’s actually pretty fun to use and I like that I’m not using power tools all the time. But I’ve learned, if I don’t take 5 minutes to sharpen it literally every time I use it, I’ll spend hours beating at the trunks of the brush on my property without much progress. But if I invest those few minutes sharpening the blade first, the work goes so much faster.
Peter
Ya, that’s a great example. I’ve seen something similar in software teams. Where they slow down a little bit to do training or to adopt a new technical practice, and they end up getting that investment back over a really short period of time.
It reminds me of an (I think) what’s an apocryphal Abraham Lincoln quote that captures this really well: “If I had six hours to chop down a tree, I’d spend the first four hours sharpening the axe.”
So what does capability building look like in practice? I think there are several key areas:
First, and probably most obvious, it can look like training team members in the core technical skills for their roles. I think companies often assume everyone already has all the core job skills they need or that they can just pick them up on the job. But technologies and practices change quickly, and good training can be a shortcut to level up skills that would take a long time to acquire on the job.
Second, training to develop collaboration skills can be really high leverage. So much of teams’ work is really what we might call “the work around the work.” If people can communicate with each other better, if meetings get more efficient and effective, and if conflict can get resolved earlier and more effectively, teams get way more productive. Before investing in training, it’s important to diagnose whether technical skills or collaboration skills are the bigger constraint.
Richard
And beyond training, investing in better tooling and technology can sometimes be a way to increase capability. I remember one developer telling me that he had to basically quit everything on his computer to free up enough memory to run the Docker containers for an app that he did some development on…and it still didn’t perform well enough to really test anything locally. Upgrading his machine for a couple thousand dollars would have been a super cheap way to unlock his productivity. It would have taken less than a week to fully pay back that investment.
And then, I think a fourth way to increase capability is good hiring and, sometimes, firing. Getting the right people on a team and moving the right people off can unlock a team’s productivity. And, by the way, sometimes people that seem like they’re not contributing well on one team are a huge asset to another team even in the same organization. It’s often a matter of fit—can you collaborate well with this particular group of people, and are your skills complementary to theirs?
Peter
Moving onto the third job, improving the system, it’s about addressing constraints that slow the team down. There are so many of these. I’ll just highlight a few that we see pretty regularly.
One of the most common system issues that impacts a team’s productivity is having to wait on external dependencies. In episode 112, I shared a story about a team that went from a 2 month to a 3-day cycle time for increments of value by actually forming cross-functional teams instead of having a series of handoffs between functional teams. And we’ve seen similar improvements just by bringing a single critical skill onto a team instead of having that as an outside dependency.
Another way to improve the system is to increase information sharing across teams. If another team has already solved a problem, you can save a lot of time if that’s easy to discover and learn from vs having to reinvent the wheel.
A third system improvement that often makes a big difference is improving decision-making processes. Make it clear who has what authority, who needs to be consulted, and what (hopefully) very few things actually require consensus decision making. Ambiguity around this tends to slow down decision-making and tends to move towards a consensus culture, sometimes in ways no one actually consciously wants.
Richard
There’s a thought experiment that I’ll use sometimes with teams who are struggling to identify meaningful system improvements. I’ll pose this: If it was literally a life-or-death situation and you had to sustainably double your capacity as a team, what would you do? What’s stopping you from doing those things now? And talking through that reveals things that are in the way that people are often treating as unchangeable.
Peter
I love that approach. And before we wrap up, let’s talk about three ways this can sort of all go wrong:
- The “training will fix everything” trap. Now, we, obviously, think good training can make a huge difference. That’s why we dedicate so much of our time to developing and delivering great workshops. But training needs to be pointed at capabilities that’ll make a difference towards larger outcomes.
- Tool obsession. Especially in the tech world, it’s really easy for people to think that some new tool will fix everything. Sometimes the tool is the constraint, but more often, it’s the humans and processes.
- The quick-fix mentality. Cutting and focusing scope is the fastest way to improve the flow of value on a team. Increasing capability and improving the system can have long-term impacts, but they often require an investment of time and money to see a result. Sometimes, there’s even a short-term dip in productivity on the way toward a long-term increasing, such as when a team figures out how to integrate a new engineering practice. And patience is essential here.
Richard
Right, as Fred Brooks famously observed, “Adding people to a late project makes it later.” You really can’t dramatically increase capacity in the short term. At least, not sustainably. But over time, systematic investment in capability and in system improvement can significantly increase a team’s speed.
Peter
We’re curious to hear your experiences. What have you seen work—or not work—when it comes to increasing team capacity? Share your stories in the comments below.
If you want help thinking through how to make your teams more effective, visit humanizingwork.com to learn about our leadership training programs. We’ll help you master all three jobs of leadership, including practical ways to increase capability and improve systems.
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