Engineering Process Is Overvalued

People gravitate toward engineering process because it's tangible and easy. You can point to it. You can say "we do Scrum" and feel like you've accomplished something. Benjamin Encz argues this is exactly the wrong place to focus. Process is one of the least important aspects of building a successful engineering team.

Here's what actually matters. First, capabilities: engineers need to understand the technology, evaluate effort to optimize cost/benefit, identify areas requiring maintenance before they kill velocity, and communicate well with each other. Second, how work is done: the team needs to understand customers and prioritize accordingly, engineers need to be engaged (which requires understanding impact and having creative freedom), they need focus time, they need to be trusted with details while being held accountable for outcomes, the team needs momentum through frequent value delivery combined with metrics, and they need limited dependencies on other parts of the organization.

What can engineering managers actually do? Hire great people—composition matters, you need a mix of seniority and people who enjoy working together. Contextualize the work with respect to the overall product. Define small packages of work with measurable outcomes because keeping packages small is the only way to get realistic milestones. Create an environment with limited distractions. Let engineers spend time on work they believe is important, fixing tech debt and leveraging their creativity. Let them participate in planning while holding them accountable. Remove dependencies.

Can process help? Maybe. But it only addresses a small subset of requirements and rarely succeeds even at that. Encz frequently sees teams implement formal Scrum but combine it with multi-month projects and waterfall—all the overhead of sprint planning, estimation, and retros without the momentum of iterative development. These teams can't hit predictable schedules because even the best engineers are terrible at estimating huge projects. There's no room for creativity because everyone's churning through predefined stories sprint after sprint.

The real issue isn't bad implementation of a specific process. It's that teams put too much emphasis on process in the first place while neglecting what actually builds great teams. Where process can help with the requirements above, implement it. But focus on hiring great people, building momentum, enabling collaboration, and engaging each team member. Process won't get that job done.