Ironically, the speed and efficiency technology brings to most professionals’ workdays can lead to slowdowns for engineering teams in the form of heavy workloads, rapidly accumulated technical debt and constant context switching. Helping their team members balance rapid results with quality and safety is a top priority for every engineering team lead.
From guarding uninterrupted focus time to fostering ongoing knowledge-sharing, the right blend of practical strategies can promote productivity and progress. Below, members of Forbes Technology Council share their own tested tips for engineering leads seeking to sustainably boost team speed.
1. Implement No-Meeting Mornings
Implement a “no-meeting mornings” policy to reserve uninterrupted time for deep work. By reducing context switching and distractions, engineers can focus on solving complex problems and delivering high-quality code faster, ultimately boosting overall team velocity. – Bing Yu Yap, Datacurve AI Inc.
2. Conduct Regular Retrospectives
Conducting regular retrospectives allows teams to reflect on their work, identify areas for improvement and celebrate successes. This fosters a culture of continuous learning and improvement, leading to increased team velocity. – Nikhil Jathar, AvanSaber Technologies
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3. Foster Transparency And An Ownership Mindset
I’ve increased my team’s velocity by fostering a culture of product mindset, extreme ownership and transparency. This approach ensures developers understand customer needs, take responsibility for delivery and keep everyone informed about project outcomes. – Rupesh Dabbir, Google
4. Gain Clarity Around And Control Of App Architecture
Focus on gaining clarity around and control of app architecture. When an engineering team clearly understands their system’s dependencies and service relationships, they can proactively reduce complexity and technical debt. As GenAI speeds and simplifies code development, architectural observability becomes essential for ensuring end-to-end resiliency and scalability and greater engineering velocity. – Moti Rafalin, vFunction Inc.
5. Use Asynchronous Communication
A streamlined asynchronous communication process is key. In a remote or hybrid setting, constant meetings and synchronous communication can significantly slow down progress, as engineers often need time to focus deeply on their tasks. By shifting to more asynchronous methods, the team can reduce interruptions, allowing for more focused work and faster delivery of tasks. – Raymond Huang, NexWave
6. Leverage AI For Backlog Prioritization
An engineering team lead can boost team velocity with AI-driven backlog prioritization and Agile workflow automation. Artificial intelligence optimizes task sequencing, reduces context switching, detects bottlenecks in real time and provides insights for continuous improvement. This minimizes inefficiencies, enhances collaboration and helps teams deliver faster with better predictability and impact. – Shyam Alok, Object Technology Solutions, Inc.
7. Encourage Pair Programming
Pair programming, where two engineers work together on the same code, boosts team velocity by improving code quality, enabling faster problem-solving and enhancing knowledge-sharing. This collaborative approach reduces bugs, accelerates learning and ensures more efficient code delivery, ultimately speeding up development timelines. – Paul Kovalenko, Langate Software
8. Prioritize Ruthlessly
Prioritize tasks ruthlessly, focusing on high-impact projects and eliminating busywork. This method declutters the team’s workload, allowing engineers to dedicate their energy to crucial deliverables. A clear, focused roadmap reduces context-switching and boosts individual productivity, ultimately accelerating team velocity. It is effective because it streamlines workflows and maximizes resource allocation. – Miguel Llorca, Axazure
9. Automate Repetitive Tasks With AI
Take the time to outsource repetitive, junior-level tasks to AI. It takes time to define these tasks with the right level of specificity so that they can be reliably done by AI, and it takes research and testing to find the right tools and the right ways to communicate with them. But in the long term, once these systems are in place, developers are freed up to focus on the hard, interesting work. – Lindsey Witmer Collins, WLCM “Welcome” App Studio
10. Implement Focus Sprints
Implement focus sprints—short, uninterrupted coding bursts with clear micro-goals. By banning meetings during these windows, velocity spikes as devs hit flow state. It’s effective because it carves out mental space for deep work, slashing context-switching lag. – Roman Reznikov, Intellias
11. Ensure Continuous Knowledge-Sharing And Real-World Feedback
To boost team velocity, engineering leads should ensure continuous knowledge-sharing and real-world feedback integration. While Agile is valuable, it’s essential to adapt methodologies based on task types, especially for support and technical tickets. Keeping team members connected to end users and business goals enhances their motivation and helps them identify and resolve issues early, improving efficiency. – Andrew Riabchuk, Akurateco
12. Hold Retrospectives And Sprint Planning
Implementing regular retrospectives and sprint planning fosters continuous improvement. By reviewing successes and challenges, teams can pinpoint hurdles and optimize workflows, boosting productivity and velocity over time. – Michael Guan, Final Round AI
13. Adopt CI/CD
One way to speed up teams is through continuous integration and continuous delivery. This methodology breaks down work into specific task sets, automates tasks and ensures high quality through iterative refinements. It enables immediate error correction, prevents workload buildup and provides steady, visible progress. – David Barberá Costarrosa, Beeping Fulfilment
14. Minimize Context-Switching
Support focus. Team members jumping between different things during a sprint impacts both quality and throughput. Training and enabling the team to minimize context-switching reduces cognitive overload and inefficiency. – Nick Tudor, Whitespectre
15. Identify And Eliminate Bottlenecks; Clarify Design Requirements
Identifying bottlenecks—often caused by unnecessary layers of processes—is crucial to understanding what slows down a team. In my experience, unclear design requirements passed to development teams result in costly mistakes across multiple teams. To improve team velocity, it’s essential to ensure clarity from the start and align on requirements early, preventing delays and inefficiencies. – Aishwarya Suresh, Medtronic Inc.
16. Conduct Pre- And Postmortems
Make pre- and postmortems part of the process. Before starting a project, think as a team about what could go wrong. After the project, analyze what went well, what could have been better and why both positive and negative events happened the way they did. Continuous learning and a drive for internal improvement are the key priorities. – Agur Jõgi, Pipedrive
17. Set Clear Delivery Dates
This will sound obvious, but simply agreeing to a delivery date will help engineering teams increase velocity. Otherwise, Parkinson’s Law kicks in, and tasks expand to fill the time. Most modern methodologies have a time box. For example, Basecamp created Shape Up and often sets a six-week time box. Scrum teams aim to ship working code within each sprint. – Tobin Harris, Pocketworks
18. Limit Work In Progress
Keeping work in progress to one or two items per team member will boost the velocity of most teams. This Kanban principle minimizes the task-switching cost. I have employed it effectively in multiple engineering teams with great results. – Dr. Sreeram Mullankandy, Elumina Health Inc.
19. Hold ‘Technical Debt Sprints’
Encourage “Technical Debt Sprints”—dedicated time for refactoring, removing inefficiencies and improving code maintainability. Teams that proactively tackle tech debt sustain long-term velocity gains, avoiding slowdowns from accumulated issues. Balancing delivery with cleanup ensures speed without sacrificing quality. – Roman Vinogradov, Improvado
20. Take Advantage Of Downtime To Tackle Backlog Projects
Maintaining an actively groomed backlog of high-business-impact but low-effort engineering projects is one way to improve team velocity. Engineering teams frequently run into scenarios where partner team dependencies may slow down progress on funded projects, leaving a few weeks of ideal engineering capacity. Such downtime can be efficiently used by working on backlog projects to improve overall output. – Udit Mehrotra, Amazon