The Best Product Engineering Org in the World

James Shore recounts a keynote at the Regional Scrum Gathering Tokyo where he was asked how to measure engineering productivity. He argues the question is unanswerable without creating harmful incentives and pivots to a more useful exercise: defining the best product engineering organization. He walks the executive team through an on-table exercise that surfaces six pillars-People, Internal Quality, Lovability, Visibility, Agility, and Profitability-that capture the essence of a high-performing engineering group.

The People pillar stresses hiring for peer leadership, teamwork and ownership rather than prestige, and describes how the company rewrote its career ladder to reward those traits. Internal Quality focuses on code that is easy to modify, low bug rates and no downtime, with concrete examples of test-driven development and continuous integration drawn from their XP culture. Lovability stresses building products that customers and internal users truly love by aligning effort with real stakeholder needs.

Visibility is about earning trust through transparent decision-making and keeping stakeholders informed, while Agility highlights the need for an entrepreneurial mindset that can pivot to new opportunities. Profitability ties engineering outcomes to business results, ensuring products are ready for sales, marketing, support and other functions. Throughout, Shore provides specific practices-team-based work assignment, peer leadership roles, ownership of "scut work", and a revised ladder that emphasizes communication and XP skills-showing how leaders can operationalize each pillar.

The piece ends by acknowledging that no organization will ever be perfect, but the six categories give leaders a concrete framework to assess gaps, prioritize cultural changes, and drive continuous improvement in both remote and on-site settings.