Hi! Cristina (Director of Engineering), and Darren (Engineering Manager), here to share the first in a series where we plan to share how we’re driving engineering excellence at Cortex.
But first, what is engineering excellence? We hear the phrase a lot now—and not just within the walls of Cortex—your “portal” to engineering excellence. While every team will have a slightly different rubric, we think it’s pretty simple—engineering excellence is what happens when developer engagement meets engineering initiatives to support business objectives.
When developers are engaged in their work, take ownership over what they’ve built, and can stay focused on highest impact initiatives, velocity goes up, issues go down, and the entire organization feels the difference. In this blog we’ll share how we think about growing strong teams, and how we use Cortex to help!
How we hire
Cortex is a product for engineers, by engineers, and our customers feel the difference! What we build, when we ship, and how quickly we action feedback are a major reason why customers love us. When expanding the team, we’re always on the look out for people wired with the same customer-centric mindset, along with four key value pillars:
Bias to Action: We thrive on ambiguous problems and move quickly to solve them. While we operate in teams organized by customer value, we expect everyone to work cross-functionally to find the right solution to customer problems.
Write the Rules: We’re building an entirely new market, which means defining our own playbook. We know the best ideas often start in pockets, but encourage every individual to be bold in championing new ways of work.
No Ego: We are honest & transparent with each other. New markets mean no one knows the right answer. We listen to signals in the market, across our customers, and within our teams. Giving space to these conversations is what helps us move faster.
Embrace Growth: We run headfirst into uncomfortable situations, to grow and learn from them. Because we know big payoffs come from big obstacles, and if we work together we’ll move with the currant instead of against it.
How Cortex helps us drive engagement for excellence
As our team has grown, Cortex has been an indispensable part of that journey. Like all growing teams, our use cases have evolved with our maturity, and operational structure. Here are three examples of how we use Cortex to drive engagement on a <100 person engineering team:
Increasing transparency
A single source of truth: Our engineering team previously used many different tools, making it difficult to find information when most needed. Now, they use Cortex as a central repository where people can see all in-flight projects.
E.g. Cortex helped us replace manual spreadsheets and wikis. Now when engineers onboard it’s easy to find what belongs to them, what they have access to, and where to find all appropriate information including things like a project’s Slack channel, owners, and documentation.
Notifications for status and action: We use Cortex to notify developers when software they own runs afoul of standards we’ve set, so they know what to do next, and in what priority order. We also use our notification framework to persist events in connected tools, like PagerDuty.
E.g. Ensuring on-call assignments: Our Cortex Slackbot tells us who’s on call in case an issue arises. Those on call receive notifications which has eliminated any inadvertently missed timeslots.
Streamlining operations
Automating security workflows and data access: We use Cortex to make it incredibly easy to request access to systems and tools as needed, avoiding otherwise lengthy approval queues.
E.g. If an engineer wants to get access to data that is locked down, they can use Workflows to quickly send approvers a notification. Managers also retain an audit log of everyone provided access.
Creating rollback workflows: Cortex helps us automate routine tasks like rollback workflows, that string together multiple actions into a single flow.
E.g. We automated incident management to create a single pane of glass for looking at SLOs and monitors to see if something is failing. Before, if we needed to do a rollback, it would take two hours to revert a PR and wait for the builds to complete. Now we have a rollback job workflow that can revert a change in a matter of minutes.
Aiding with team management
Encouraging team support: We encourage a team-first mentality, which while often not quantifiable, can be in part directionally assessed by things like code reviews.
E.g. During review reason, engineers check Eng Intelligence to chart contributions and build a personal plan towards improvement.
Recognizing workload imbalances: As a remote-first organization, we use Eng Intelligence to surface workload imbalances that might otherwise go unnoticed.
E.g. We don’t want to wait until someone says, “I’m buried in code reviews,” before making a change that can curtail this break points. Cortex helps give visibility to team leads so they can distribute work more evenly.
Advice for teams looking to achieve engineering excellence
We’ve shared a few ways we use Cortex to help align our team, and streamline operations. But the most exciting thing about building for Cortex is knowing the unlimited number of ways our customers will be able to define standards for—and drive progress towards—any measure of engineering excellence. But we’ll leave you with two insights that we have found to be universal truths in achieving engineering excellence at any scale:
Trusted data
The enemy of any high-performing hopeful is disorganization in the data they're trying to track. Knowing who owns what, what it’s made of, what state it’s in, and what the dependencies are keeps your team connected and moving in the same direction.
Visibility for all
And while moving in the same direction is important, it’s equally crucial to understand the path others are taking to get there. Especially in fast-growing engineering organizations, it’s easy for teams to lose sight of what peers are doing. Finding a system that provides appropriate transparency wherever possible keeps teams aligned in data, and in execution.
If Cortex sounds like a place you want to pursue your own path towards excellence, we want to hear from you! Find a role at https://www.cortex.io/careers today!
