Date // 26/02/2025 // Timings (50 mins) // 10:00 EDT | 16:00 CEST
In today’s dynamic tech environment, balancing deep, focused work with effective collaboration is key to enhancing both developer experience and productivity.
We'll explore how do we balance both so that our dev teams have high-quality time for coding while still receiving rich context from the right people and teams?
Together with our guests, Jevgeni Demidov (Director of Engineering at Pipedrive) and Jon Kern (Agile Manifesto Co-author, Software Engineer at Adaptavist), Anita Zbieg (CEO at Network Perspective) will dive into the art and science of structuring work to unleash the full potential of dev teams.
What topic will we cover?
Time is our greatest constraint and collaboration is our key strength. How can we ensure our dev teams have enough focused time for coding while still receiving valuable input from the right people and teams?
Deep, focused work—uninterrupted blocks of at least two hours—enables engineers to achieve a flow state, key for high performing tech teams. By minimizing distractions and reducing time loss, dev teams enhance individual engineer productivity.
How can we balance more focused time with deliberate collaboration? Collaboration is central to the Developer Experience at GitHub. However, GitHub's 'Good Day' project underscores the need for well-structured collaboration, showing that reducing work interruptions can significantly boost daily progress, with some developers increasing their productivity from 7% to 82%. Conversely, increasing daily meetings from two to three can drastically reduce the likelihood of developers achieving their daily goals, with success rates plummeting from 74% to just 14%.
What about the broader picture? Atlassian's latest research identifies a lack of deep work as one of the top five time wasters for engineers. Similarly, a Microsoft study reveals that a bad day for dev teams typically involves insufficient focus time, excessive meetings, and—unclear priorities, requirements, and value misalignment, often resulting from inadequate collaboration.
More deep work time also creates room for broader DevEx improvements without delaying key tasks. Engineers are eager to address what frustrates them; they just need the time and empowerment to do so. Allocating four hours weekly for DevEx improvements has led Atlassian to impressive results, including the Confluence team doubling their pull requests reaching production within 48 hours, and the Trello team cutting 24,000 lines of unused code.
There are three key approaches I observe among tech teams: (1) many reduce the number of meetings or switch to asynchronous substitutes to free up time for deep work; (2) some structure their work and meeting times more effectively; and (3) others cultivate a data-informed team-level awareness of meetings and deep work habits to continuously learn and adapt.
Shopify experimented with radical meeting cuts, which could strain collaboration. On the lighter side, companies such as Slack and GitLab embraced 'Focus Fridays'—special days each week reserved for deep work, though GitLab no longer supports this initiative. Slack also introduced 'Makers Week,' designated weeks each quarter dedicated to deep work. Many teams are adopting asynchronous alternatives to meetings, such as async standups, and Atlassian for instance, experimented with Loom recordings to replace meetings, reducing reliance on synchronous communication.
Uber and Stripe leverage real-time data from collaboration systems to continuously provide teams with feedback on their deep work time, valuing this information as highly for productivity as code metrics. The teams I work with are taking it even further; they not only receive data-informed feedback about how they allocate their time for deep work, meetings, and context switching during the week, but they also gain insights into their collaboration dynamics. This includes how they balance synchronous meetings and asynchronous written communication, both within and across teams, and details on the specific teams they interact with, all while ensuring 100% protection of individual privacy.
Ben at Honeycomb and Pipedrive are taking a different approach by focusing on smarter ways to structure meetings. Honeycomb initially experimented with asynchronous stand-ups, but finding them ineffective, they shifted to meandering team sync meetings. These are held for one hour a day, five days a week, during hours that accommodate different time zones. They've minimized other meetings by incorporating planning, retrospectives, and coordination with other teams into these sync sessions.
Many tech teams measure developer productivity using output-oriented system metrics, such as code commits or reviews. Top teams, like yours, at Pipedrive, extend their metrics to include focused work and meeting times, utilizing data from collaboration tools.
However, collecting, cleaning, processing, visualizing, and distributing this data demands effort. To effectively reduce or restructure meetings along with focused work time, a framework that includes alignment and commitment is essential. Ultimately, whether or not to utilize the data depends on its perceived value in measuring work habits.
How to balance time for focused work and meetings in dev teams at scale? | LinkedIn
