Being an engineering manager and developing high-quality enterprise products is always a challenge for me. I hope this is true for the majority of us.
We are developing a search platform that allows seamless interaction with Drupal sites and a superior search experience, and over a thousand enterprise clients are utilizing it extensively.
Quality is one of the long-standing issues that I’ve been attempting to address for the past couple of quarters by changing the process, introducing a Review manager role who can delegate reviewers (experts in that area) based on the PR / functional change, feedback meetings, review meetings, etc. However, nothing has helped us close the gap significantly.
So, I decided to take a step back and begin from the bottom. I divided the product into three distinct parts.
- Internal system / Org culture / process / other internal & external stakeholders
- Team members
- Process
When I drew a connection between all three, I began to feel the gap in each of the components and chose to mend them and observe the results.
Ex:
- There isn’t a clear explanation of search rights, and a lot of customers use way more than they’re allowed to. This creates a stability problem and could cause a loss of revenue.
- Technical Account Management and Account Management, or anyone can reach out to us for any platform-level problem, which always keeps us away from focusing on core issues.
- The team is average and lacks clear documentation on each member’s responsibilities and documents such as coding standards and process manuals, which leads to misunderstanding and misdirection on our difficulties.
Decided to fix two things at first,
- Identified underperforming employees and assisted them with coaching and locating a replacement.
- In the professional development document, record the feedback and expectations that would expand their vision and work.
- Plan the quarter in detail and discuss it with the entire team.
Above changes are started showing promises on how to proceed further.