What are the biggest challenges in engineering leadership for 2023
The rapidly changing business and technology landscape makes it difficult for engineering leaders. What are your biggest challenges going to be in 2023?
The rapidly changing business and technology landscape makes it difficult for engineering leaders. We must enable growth by helping to scale initiatives throughout the enterprise. Yet, we face significant external and internal challenges. So what are the most critical challenges for leaders in the engineering space?
Attracting and retaining top engineering talent
Balancing technical and business needs
Managing and prioritizing projects effectively
Maintaining a culture of innovation and continuous learning
Encouraging collaboration and communication among cross-functional teams
Keeping up with rapidly changing technologies
Managing budgets and resources effectively
Ensuring quality and reliability in products and services
Promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion in the workplace
Staying ahead of competitors and adapting to industry changes.
So how do we tacking each of these challenges?
Attracting and retaining top engineering talent
Stay engaged with the engineering community through events, conferences, and other networking opportunities can help to build your reputation as an employer of choice and attract top talent.
Give people a reason to work with you. Show them the big significant problem they’re going to solve. Ensure you can communicate your company's story and the challenges you plan to tackle.
Balancing technical and business needs
Regularly reassess the balance between technical and business needs, and adjust as necessary to ensure that both are met sustainably. As a leader, you must clearly define and communicate each project or initiative's technical and business goals and ensure that both teams work towards the same end goal.
Technical debt is a necessary evil, but letting it grow too much will destroy your team's productivity. Your developers want to build new features. Your QA department wants to test new features. And your sales and marketing teams want to talk about new features. Technical debt hinders all of those goals. Balancing feature development with technical debt reduction should be something you focus on in 2023.
Managing and prioritizing projects effectively
Organizations frequently pursue many projects simultaneously. Almost inevitably, the number of small and large projects in a portfolio exceeds the available resources, such as funds, equipment, staff time, and competencies. With so many project tasks assigned, distractions caused by jumping from one task to another, and multi-tasking across projects – it can be overwhelming.
Uncertainty is the enemy of productivity. If everyone works without clear benchmarks and goals, they may all be working toward something different. Ensure your team understands their goals and what’s expected from them in general and for each new project or task. This means discussing goals regularly. According to Hypercontext’s State of High Performing Teams in Tech report, 54% of people confident in their company’s ability to hit their goals discuss them weekly.
Maintaining a culture of innovation and continuous learning
Innovation isn’t a task that you complete and then move on. It’s a continuous exercise tied to your organization’s learning and development. Continuous innovation stimulates revenue growth and helps companies perform better during economic downturns.
When team members grow within a learning culture, they develop improvement mindsets and pursue opportunities to learn and share knowledge with their teams, which can positively impact an organization's health and future success. More significantly, high performers are more likely to credit an extensive learning culture with helping them achieve organizational business goals. Organizations that foster strong learning cultures are more adaptable, flexible, and innovative. They are also more likely to embrace change and less likely to be risk-averse.
Encouraging collaboration and communication among cross-functional teams
Teamwork makes the dream work is a famous saying. But it’s a sentiment that’s often easier said than done, especially regarding cross-team collaboration. Cross-functional collaboration is an antidote to that chaos. It helps cross-functional teams build harmony across the organization.
Collaboration among employees and teams is even more critical these days. Indeed, a crisis such as COVID-19 impacts every part of the business. As a consequence, the response requires cross-functional work. Involving people with different areas of influence from the beginning helps secure buy-in, empathy, and trust. There’s less “turf” to be protected, and everyone is on the same page, so fewer delays exist. Collaboration with experts in different areas of the business cross-pollinates knowledge that's sometimes hidden and helps everyone understand how their work fits into the bigger picture.
Keeping up with rapidly changing technologies
Encouraging your team to keep up with technological changes is a crucial challenge in 2023. It's easy to focus on urgent tasks and forget the big picture. You are going backward if your team is not learning and keeping up with new technologies.
Since 2000, 52% of Fortune 500 companies have either "gone bankrupt, been acquired, or ceased to exist due to digital disruption,” according to Harvard Business Review. They did not keep up with changing technologies. With most executives worried that their business models are at risk of disruption, business leaders must stay updated on technology that could help set their employees and their organization up for success now and in the future. Constantly looking for ways to improve should be a business strategy.
Managing budgets and resources effectively
Effective and efficient budget management is the cornerstone of a successful business operation. Planning is vital to the budgeting process, drawn from the company's short- and long-term objectives. The plan must be aligned with the objectives, goals, and visions of the business and the overall business strategy.
Your budget strategy should also be flexible for changing technology trends and organizational business goal shifts. You should include research and development expenses in your budget strategy and a plan for staying aware of new developments in the world of technology and keeping up with or staying ahead of your competitors.
Ensuring quality and reliability in products and services
Reliability is imperative for any digital business. Reliability must be a key component of its service architecture and, more importantly, a first-class goal for the organization.
Most businesses won’t succeed if they can’t build customer trust; countless potential sales are lost when brands fail to make deeper connections with prospective buyers. By contrast, when you gain the confidence and loyalty of consumers, you have more freedom to make decisions such as raising prices. Ensuring high-quality products and services is one way to help consumers appreciate and believe in what you have to offer.
In an economic downturn, customers may have tough choices, and you don't want your company on the chopping block because you did not create a stable service. Studies also show a strong positive association between quality and profitability. High quality produces a higher return on investment (ROI) for any market share.
Promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion in the workplace
It's common knowledge that technology organizations are often not as diverse as other business units. There’s still a lot of work to be done to improve diversity in the technology industry and tech-based roles. As a technology leader, you must recognize the importance of building inclusive technology cultures that foster engagement, collaboration, and belonging that reflect a diverse technology workforce and deliver value.
Diversity in technology is essential for businesses that want to stay relevant to their customers and competitive in the talent market. An inclusive work environment offers opportunities for growth and achievement in a broader range of work. This is essential to creating more resilient communities and a more equitable world.
Many companies have stated that they value diversity and inclusion. However, companies must commit to taking action to improve diversity in tech truly. Initiatives don’t have to be complicated, but they must be focused and make a real impact.
Staying ahead of competitors & adapting to industry changes.
The business landscape constantly evolves, and technology is a major driving force behind this change. To stay ahead of the competition, businesses must adapt and evolve continuously. They need to be proactive, not reactive, to anticipate the needs of their customers and the changes in their industry. They also need to be agile to adapt quickly to changing market conditions.
As technology becomes the catalyst for business strategy and transformation, the lines between business and technology functions are blurring, and the expectations of IT are shifting, leading many organizations to reimagine the role of technology and rethink traditional operating models and organizational structures.
Technology continues to race ahead, bringing innovative applications seemingly bound only by the imagination. Automation, the industrial Internet of Things, and robotics, among others, are transforming how companies approach the production and delivery of goods.
"Let's continue to lead with purpose, passion, and positivity and inspire those around us to do the same."