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How to Survey Your Team: Ask the Developers What Headaches They Are Facing
What technical issues do we need to address? A developer survey is not a KPI alone. We need a specific context to help prioritize a roadmap
Imagine the scene: You’re driving down an endless road at high speed. The gas gauge has been warning you for several miles, but you can’t stop to refuel. You have to get to your destination as soon as possible, and there’s no time for anything else. Eventually, you’ll run out of fuel, the engine will break down, and you’ll have to abandon that car.
This example could be used to illustrate the day-to-day of many startups, only focused on bringing out new features at whatever cost. Without spending time and stopping to ask their software developers what they need to work more efficiently or what parts of their work cause them the most technical headaches.
Here we talk about something vast since they can be anything from software tools for which they do not have the hardware, to the codebase itself, to the technical debt, to obsolete libraries that we never get time to update. In other words, they can be the things we overlook. Here we include testing processes, QA processes, continuous integration, release to achieve a build, the documentation, the onboarding process of new members, or the way of communication with the rest of the product team (designers, product manager, or engineering managers).
Our goal will be to build a plan of action by prioritizing those issues on the roadmap and giving more weight to those technical tasks that until now were hidden.
What are the issues that are causing problems in your daily work? What technical issues do we need to improve on? Obviously, this is not just a KPI, but we need a context to help prioritize a roadmap better. The solution could be to ask the team’s developers what they think. This is where the developer survey idea comes in. This survey is not to be misunderstood as an indicator of developer happiness; it covers many more things.
