Searching for leverage in all the wrong places

It's well documented that the pandemic-induced remote work trend has led to globally distributed teams working more asynchronously than ever before. Less well understood is the impact this has had on the way engineering teams operate, taking something that was already quite difficult - staying aligned across fast moving, autonomous software development teams - almost unmanageable in many cases. Despite having more tools, teams, metrics, and frameworks at their disposal to help teams go faster, somehow it’s getting slower to build and ship products.

In today’s business climate, execs are asking their engineering leaders and managers to meet the same business, technical, and quality objectives with fewer resources, tools and support roles. This “do more with less” mandate puts intense pressure on the middle layer of engineering management. Their teams, more async and distributed than ever, have doubled in size while supporting resources have been cut in half. So bogged down by the time required just to maintain visibility into what’s going on that there is no time for anything else.

Stop for a minute and add up all the time and energy that engineering managers spend tactically gathering the intel they need to triage issues and manage their teams. Think about the tedious work required to stay on top of how a project and teams are doing, identifying friction, and taking action. Days are wasted chasing down project updates, scheduling meetings, bugging engineers, and sorting through Jira tickets and GitHub PRs to figure out where the bottlenecks are. Buried in the trivial details crowds out the time needed to ideate, plan for, and push through high-impact initiatives.

Now consider the impact it would have on engineering managers to keep them focused on execution and strategy. Or consider the costs if you don’t. Organizations that don't find process and execution leverage for their leaders will become ever more reactive, slowly losing talented managers that get burnt out spending all their time managing information and not enough time driving execution.

Imagine if you had all the information and insights at your fingertips to debug the execution of projects and team in minutes without the unnecessary meetings, ceremonies, disruptions, and tools previously required to get it. You’d get to spend less time managing coordination, alignment, and status across projects and teams, and more time keeping them moving forward by resolving issues, mitigating risks, and accelerating decision timelines. As a more proactive manager with a more productive and collaborative team, you'd effectively unlock a new gear.

This is where KATA can help engineering leaders & managers by putting the focus back on execution. KATA is the leading Engineering Execution Platform, equipping managers with the just-in-time insights to debug progress across engineering projects and teams. All the intel you need to help your team go faster is never more than a click away. Go as wide or deep as you need, whenever you need to, absent the unnecessary meetings, ceremonies, disruptions, and tools.

Interested in seeing how KATA can generate the leverage you need to unlock a new gear for you and your team? Take a product tour to find out: https://www.getkata.com/product-tour