Is your team buzzing?
Before your team's velocity drops, energy fades. Here’s how to spot it.
👋 Hey, it’s Stephane. I share lessons, and stories from my journey to help you lead with confidence as an Engineering Manager. To accelerate your growth see: 50 Notion Templates | The EM’s Field Guide | CodeCrafters | Get Hired as an EM | 1:1 Coaching
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We’ve got plenty of ways to measure team performance. DORA metrics, SPACE framework, DX-Core 4. They all serve a purpose even if they are not perfect.
But none of them capture the one thing you feel instinctively.. the thing you sense the moment you step into a team meeting:
Energy
Are people excited to be there and discuss the thing, debug this tricky issue together, plan for the next week, or reflect on the previous one?
Or is the team on the call out of necessity? Just because they have to..
The 3 types of energy
I separate energy in three directions:
Product energy - a genuine enthusiasm for the thing we’re building
Team energy - a strong bond with the people we’re building it with
Tech energy - excitement about the technology and frameworks used to build it
Product energy
Some engineers care deeply about what happens to a feature after it’s “done”. How much it’s used, does it help people, etc.
It’s when an engineer catches something in the product analytics that looks wrong and proactively offers a fix. It’s the casual Slack message that says, “I was thinking about this user journey and I think we can improve it by doing X”.
When this type of energy is present engineers start to sound like product managers at times. Curiosity becomes contagious.
There are product priority debates that happen between the PM and the engineers because everyone cares about what should be delivered next.
Team energy
This is basically how much people enjoy being in the presence of others.
Do people enjoy grabbing lunch together, or discussing about things other than work?
Do they share common interests, or debate and disagree about topics that have nothing to do with work?
Obviously this is not required to be successful, but I see people who have the tendency to gel like this, be able to easier tackle work out disagreements and equally enjoy working with each other more.
They have the type of friendly relationship that makes reaching out for advice or help a lot easier.
Pair programming becomes less awkward.
Saying “I don’t know” becomes more natural and sharing feedback to each other as well.
Creating trust is at the core of it.
Tech Energy
How often do your engineers talk about your tech stack?
Do people tinker in their own time? Do they drop links of tech blogs in the team chat just because something excited them? Do they show up on Monday with a side project that’s unexpectedly useful (or useless but was fun to work on)?
When tech energy is high, engineers explore without needing permission. Technology becomes a playground, not a constraint.
I am not advocating for using every new shiny library here. What I love seeing though is engineers who are in sync with their ecosystem. They know what’s being discussed. What’s worthy of trying out for real in our projects, and what’s just noise.
Turning Instinct into Insight
You don’t need a formal dashboard to track team energy (you probably can’t build one if you had to anyway). A few observations each week are enough.
Every Friday, make some notes:
Were there any surprise product suggestions?
Did engineers question any product decisions in a constructive way?
How fast were code reviews this week?
Did any new ideas come up informally or in team meetings that we hadn’t considered?
Was there excitement around a new tool or pattern?
Add more to this list as you see fit.
Patterns will emerge. You'll start to spot trends. And more importantly, you’ll know when the team needs a spark before delivery metrics begin to dip.
A word for managers
If the energy is low, the root cause may not be the team. It could be you. It could also be related to wider company changes.
Layoffs, org restructures, unclear goals, shifting priorities, constant interruptions - these things can slow momentum. Before you diagnose the team, check if the environment is holding them back.
As one of my favourite leadership principles from L. David Marquet suggests:
“Fix the environment, not the people”
Your job isn’t to push harder (although sometimes that’s needed). In most cases you need to remove the noise, then make room for energy to return.
When a team is buzzing, everything else follows.
That’s all, folks!
See you in the next one,
~ Stephane
PS. Random, but last week I actually got invited in a meeting that started like this.
