RDEL #67: Do user-centric engineering teams build better products? (2024 DORA Report)

This week we review the DORA reports findings on user-centricity, and dig into the reasons why higher user-centricity leads to better product performance.

Welcome back to Research-Driven Engineering Leadership. Each week, we pose an interesting topic in engineering leadership and apply the latest research in the field to drive to an answer.

This week we continue our three-part review of the 2024 DORA report by looking at the top findings around user-centricity. To that end, we ask: do user-centric engineering teams build better products (and why)?

The context

The DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) group’s annual report marks a decade of research into the practices that drive high-performing software engineering teams. This year’s report surveyed more than 39,000 technical professionals, providing a robust data set on key performance metrics like software delivery, productivity, and team dynamics. To deepen understanding, the team also conducted select in-depth interviews to get deeper perspectives on emerging themes like AI adoption. By applying rigorous statistical analysis, the report identifies the practices, organizational structures, and cultural factors that correlate with improved team and organizational outcomes.

Much as AI has enhanced the development experience, software is still primarily built by and for humans. Last year the DORA report reviewed the impact of user-centricity on overall organizational performance (which we covered), but this year we’ll cover the specific impact on product and team performance.

The research

This year researchers asked a series of questions to understand what factors, when applied to engineering teams, create the highest quality product and development experience. The top three findings they found were:

1. The more user-centric a team is, the better their product and delivery throughput.

   
   User-centric teams consistently report higher productivity, job satisfaction, and lower burnout. But it wasn’t only that - it turns out that when teams are user-centric, stability and throughput are not a requirement for product quality. Put differently, teams with low levels of user-centricity require high delivery throughput for product performance, but teams with high user-centricity do not.
   
   Why is this? Researchers speculate it’s because of purpose: when engineers feel like their work matters, they will work to deliver a higher-quality product experience. In the words of the researchers, “there’s no longer a disconnect between the software that’s developed and the world in which it lives.” Also, user-centricity tends to increase cross-functional collaboration, which breaks engineers out of silos and increases learning.

   

2. On user-centric teams, documentation significantly increases product performance.
   
   This finding builds on last year’s research that documentation has a generally large and significantly positive impact on performance and productivity. Good documentation is not performative, but rather it is reliable, findable, and iterated on frequently.

Product performance and documentation quality across three levels of user centricity

3. Unstable priorities create small but meaningful decreases in productivity, and substantial increases in burnout.
   
   In order to build for their users, engineering teams need time to execute on priorities. However, in teams with unstable priorities, data shows a drop in productivity and a rise in burnout. Researchers hypothesize that unstable priorities reduce the teams sense of control and autonomy and also leads to increased workloads.
   
   Interestingly, when priorities are stabilized, software delivery performance can slow. Researchers believe this may be because organizations with stable priorities might have products that are in generally good shape and change a little less frequently. Perhaps stable priorities means shipping less frequently, or in larger batches.

The application

This week’s DORA report review highlights just how powerful user centricity is, and the ways a team can amplify that benefit and watch for any risks. To put those findings into practice, here are our top recommendations:

1. Above all else, bring engineering teams closer to the user. By integrating user feedback mechanisms into the software development workflow, engineers can build higher-quality products. Anticipating and understanding user needs means the software is better-aligned to deliver on the value that customers need. The benefits are multi-faceted: better product performance, increased purpose, and more.

2. Invest in documentation. No surprise, better documentation builds better team performance. The caveat here is not to build for performative reasons (i.e outdated documents that no one uses), but introduce a culture that shares their learning frequently and collaboratively in documents. This will increase knowledge-sharing, improve onboarding, and further improve product performance.

3. Consider the impact of changing priorities. To be clear, in today’s world of fast-paced technology innovation it is expected that companies meet the moment by re-evaluating priorities. However, those decisions come with trade-offs, and too many changing priorities generates instability and hurts the team’s productivity and well-being. As an engineering leader, consider those impacts and either (a) find ways to build stability into your roadmap somewhere, or (b) combat the downstream impacts by supporting your team’s workload, stress, or unease about the changes.

—

Have a wonderful, user-centric week. And Happy Research Tuesday!

Lizzie