Leading Effective Engineering Teams

Chapter 2. Efficiency Versus Effectiveness Versus Productivity

The previous chapter provided an introduction to what makes a software engineering team effective and how to build those characteristics into your team. By now, you must have an idea of what it means to be effective. Effectiveness is an indicator of individual or team performance. You may have also encountered the terms efficiency and productivity in relation to employee or team performance, but what do those terms actually mean? While these concepts are interconnected, they hold distinct meanings. Understanding these differences is crucial for accurately assessing and guiding your team.

A software engineering team that is churning out code is efficient if it’s following processes, writing clean code, fixing issues, and meeting deadlines. It’s also productive if it’s quick in completing its tasks of coding, testing, fixing, and releasing the code. However, to be effective, the code released should address user problems and make a positive impact on the business. Simply put:

• Efficiency is about doing things right.

• Effectiveness is about doing the right thing.

• Productivity is a measure of output over input.

While you can use any of these concepts to measure a team’s performance, it’s essential to understand the implications of each. This chapter will dive into the differences between efficiency, effectiveness, and productivity for software engineering teams. You will explore the factors influencing each of these ...