How Visibility Leads to Higher Performing Teams and Better Business Outcomes

Read time: ~12 mins

The Developer Success Lab at Pluralsight Flow set out to study how developers and their teams maintain productivity, work deeply and collaboratively, and make a real-world impact. This whitepaper summarizes the second of three in-depth research studies with software teams on how real-world developers and their teams achieve success. 

Across quantitative data from 1,282 developers and rich qualitative data from 15+ hours of conversations in interviews and focus groups, we share findings about: 

• How developers experience their working environments

• How experiences of learning culture, agency, motivation, and belonging impact developer productivity and performance

• Strategies that developers use to navigate these complex environments 

Each of these whitepapers will include recommendations you can immediately put into practice, based on what we’ve learned about how healthy measurement can benefit software teams.

In Study 1, we: 

• Introduce the Developer Thriving framework

• Explain its connection to developer productivity

• Provide recommendations on how to use this framework to boost both productivity and developer satisfaction 

In Study 2, discussed in this whitepaper, we dive more deeply into how visibility contributes to improved engagement, performance, and productivity from both individuals and team members. We also explore how expecting and anticipating moments of recognition influences developer motivation, engagement, and performance.  

In Study 3, we share recommendations on how to use the right software metrics the right way. We start with our finding that although 87% of developers believed in the benefits of using metrics to measure their work, only 20-30% of developers report being on a team that consistently uses team-level software metrics. From there, we explain how increased measurement leads to positive outcomes, including: 

• A greater sense of value and mastery among developers

• Increased coping abilities and distress tolerance

• More empathy and self-compassion

In the previous whitepaper in our Developer Thriving series, we discussed the Developer Thriving framework, which offers a solution to the question engineering leaders face today: 

While this framework provides a great starting point for engineering leaders hoping to ramp up engineering performance and satisfaction without increasing spend (e.g. on new tools), our research unearthed another lever to maximize engineering success: visibility. Here, we define visibility as the ability to create transparency around work for both employees and leadership.

Our research showed that it improves:

• Employee satisfaction and trust
• Company metrics – and, ultimately, profitability

More specifically, we found that increasing visibility is a low-cost way to strengthen:

Visibility motivates developers to solve hard problems and raises confidence for individual contributors and managers alike.

When leaders share business context with engineering teams, developers make better decisions about trade-offs, priorities, and investments, and build better software.

More visibility means that leaders can set realistic goals and make appropriate company-wide changes.

But our research showed major room for improvement:

This is all the more reason for a deep dive into what visibility really means, and how to optimize it at your org. In this paper, we dig into: 

• The two kinds of visibility you should enable 

• Common challenges to creating positive visibility cycles 

• Recommendations on how to improve visibility in your organization