Paid Subscribers Only: CEOs, is your culture sabotaging software quality?

When I speak with CEOs, they often feel frustrated by their teams’ perceived lack of pace and urgency. But are their behaviours contributing to these issues?

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CEOs, is your culture sabotaging software quality?

When I speak with CEOs, they often feel frustrated by their teams’ perceived lack of pace and urgency. They hear their customers’ expectations, their sales teams’ calls for new things to talk about and their competitors breathing down their necks. From their perspective, the product development teams are falling short of expectations.

(Before you read further, I’d suggest taking a look at my previous blog on ‘Quality vs speed in software development: insights for CEOs’).

CEOs observe spurts of output from their product development teams, loud failures resulting in noise from customers and the customer service teams and long periods where they disappear to work on technical things with vague promises of things improving some time in the future.

This blog does not absolve those in product development of their role in these issues. Its focus is on the role of a CEO. As CEO – someone who can have an outsized influence on the company culture – it’s crucial to recognise your role in shaping the culture that influences your product development team’s pace and effectiveness.

How might you be contributing to this situation?

How does your organisation’s culture shape the pace and effectiveness of value delivery?

It’s important to remember that mismatches of expectations and sources of friction between product development and the rest of the organisation are common across industries and company maturity levels. It doesn’t need to be this way, but for most, it is because maintaining environments conducive to producing quality is complicated and needs to be maintained. Why this goes wrong in many companies varies but almost always intersects with the company culture.

The critical question for you, the CEO, is what may be within your control that can help improve the situation. The answer? More than you may realise.

Some questions to consider when assessing factors that may contribute to the issues:

• What are the expectations you are setting for the team?

• What context do they have for the decisions they are making?

• What behaviours are being encouraged?

• How are your actions being interpreted by the organisation?

• What lessons are they learning on how to act and how work gets done in your organisation?

• What is the balance between short and long-term investment of effort?

• What is being incentivised?

Let’s explore the different organisational culture traits and their effects on software development.

• Hubris

• Discomfort with uncertainty

• Absence of a culture of feedback

• Information hoarding

• Competition instead of collaboration

• Fear of failure

• Blame culture

• Hero culture

• Perpetuating the hub and spoke model of interactions

This post will expand on each of these topics before answering:

“What can CEOs do to encourage a high-performance, high-quality culture?”