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In my last article, I wrote about cultivating an engineering process that really works for your team. I brought up retrospectives as a key tool for doing this, a mechanism for your team to discuss what’s working and what isn’t so that they can decide what adjustments they’d like to make.

But that’s a very tactical view of what a retrospective is and does. Retrospectives can and should be so much more. If your engineering process is the heartbeat of your engineering team, your team’s retrospectives are its soul.

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Because process is so central to everything we do, having a good process is one of the highest-leverage ways to help a team perform at their best. Having a bad process, on the other hand, is one of the easiest ways to grind a team to a halt, destroying morale in the process.

As an engineering leader, learning to cultivate a good engineering process is one of the most important ways you can invest in your team’s skills.

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I vividly remember sitting with a friend in a small bistro in Budapest after speaking at a conference in February of 2020. As we ate dinner, our conversation turned to the new respiratory virus in China, and I recall guessing it would soon be relatively contained like SARS and MERS before it. I had no idea how wrong those words would turn out to be, or that my flight back to the US would be the last time I saw the inside of an airplane (one of my very favorite places) for the next 15 months.

The year that followed proved to be the hardest of the more than a decade I’ve been working remotely. I joked that because I was already accustomed to working from home, work was the most normal part of my life during COVID. And that’s true, but it leaves out just how hard working from home was during the pandemic and how lonely I felt most of the time doing it.

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