As engineering leaders from around the world gathered in San Francisco for the 2024 Annual Engineering Executive Leadership Council Summit, Encora took advantage of the opportunity to host an exclusive dinner event. The evening brought together engineering executives from diverse industries, including real estate, education, media/entertainment, telecom, and hi-tech. Set against the backdrop of the picturesque La Mar restaurant at Pier 1 1/2, the event provided an ideal setting for relaxed yet insightful discussions—the topic: how data-driven approaches are transforming engineering management, operations, and product development.
The Rising Importance of Data-Driven Engineering Management
One of the topics that emerged during our conversations was the challenge faced by new engineering leaders in establishing a baseline for their organizations. As one attendee noted, "Taking on a new role as an engineering leader, I want to get a baseline to understand where and how my organization is performing today and to start to see where the points for improvement might be. This needs to be a portfolio-based view so that I can see where money is being spent on people and infrastructure compared to the return we are getting as a company on each product/service."
This sentiment echoes a growing trend in the industry: the shift from intuition-based decision-making to data-driven engineering management.
This transition is no longer optional but essential for organizations aiming to stay competitive in today's rapidly evolving technological landscape.
Encora's Approach to Data-Driven Engineering
As a global digital engineering company with a cloud-first, data-first, and AI-first approach, Encora is uniquely positioned to help organizations navigate this transition, thanks, in part, to our multiple strategic partnerships. For example, our partnership with Jellyfish, a leading Engineering Management Platform, enables us to provide visibility into how teams build and ship software.
Jellyfish's platform offers a comprehensive view of engineering processes, pulling data from multiple sources to create a quantitative foundation. This is complemented by qualitative data gathered through surveys, providing a holistic picture of an organization's engineering efforts.
However, data alone is not enough. The real value lies in how this data is interpreted and acted upon. This is where Encora's expertise comes into play. We leverage this wealth of information to suggest, plan, and implement proven practices that increase performance on a case-by-case basis, whether optimizing engineering operations or enhancing product development outcomes. Our approach encompasses improvements in tooling, processes, practices, technologies (including Generative AI), and team topologies. This dual focus on engineering management and product development ensures that our data-driven solutions deliver comprehensive value across the organization.
The Power of Managed Teams in Data-Driven Engineering
One of Encora's differentiators is our Managed Team model. This model allows us to take ownership of team assembly and performance, enabling organizations to scale their engineering capabilities.
By combining the Managed Team model with data-driven insights, we can:
- Rapidly identify areas for improvement
- Assemble teams with the right mix of skills to address these areas
- Continuously monitor and optimize team performance
This combination of data-driven insights and flexible team management allows organizations to adapt quickly to changing market conditions and disruptive technological advancements.
FinOps: Optimizing Engineering Investments
Another important aspect of data-driven engineering is FinOps, or Financial Operations. As organizations grow, it becomes increasingly important to understand and optimize the financial aspects.
Encora's data-driven approach to FinOps provides engineering leaders with:
- Clear visibility into where money is being spent on people and infrastructure
- Insights into the return on investment for each product or service
- Opportunities for cost optimization without sacrificing quality or velocity
By aligning engineering efforts with business outcomes, we help organizations maximize the value of their engineering investments.
The power of data-driven engineering lies in its versatility. While it provides essential insights for engineering management and FinOps decisions, its impact extends beyond operational metrics. Organizations that embrace data-driven approaches see transformative results across two key dimensions: enhanced engineering team performance and improved product outcomes. Let's look at how this dual impact plays out in practice.
Real-World Impact
As demonstrated by our client partnerships, data-driven approaches deliver value in both operational excellence and product success. By applying data-driven methodologies across the engineering lifecycle, organizations can achieve improvements in both team performance and product effectiveness.
On the engineering management front, our work with Avid demonstrates the power of combining engineering metrics with managed teams. As Kevin Isacks, Vice President Cloud, Media & Video Engineering at Avid notes, "The end-to-end visibility on the Engineering flow and tasks consolidated from multiple tools by Jellyfish helps me to understand improvement opportunities and balance planning. Encora, with their managed teams model, helps me to build high-performance teams and put those improvement plans into action."
Beyond engineering operations, data-driven approaches also drive product success. One of our clients, Movoto, a leading real estate listing service, faced challenges in streamlining its data assets to enhance analytical insights. By leveraging Encora's data science and analytics capabilities, we helped them extract meaningful insights and enhance decision-making using real-time performance data. The results were impressive:
- 50% increase in site traffic
- 200% improvement in conversion rate
These examples demonstrate the tangible business impact that can be achieved through a data-driven approach, whether applied to engineering management or product outcomes.
Embracing Data-Driven Engineering
The importance of data-driven engineering will only continue to grow. Organizations that embrace this approach will be better positioned to:
- Make informed decisions about resource allocation
- Drive product innovations through data-driven insights
- Re-align engineering efforts with evolving business objectives
- Respond quickly to changing market conditions and disruptive technological advancements
The transition to data-driven engineering is no longer a luxury—it is a necessity for organizations looking to thrive in today's competitive landscape.
At Encora, we're committed to helping our clients not just navigate this evolving landscape but to lead in it. By combining our deep expertise in digital engineering with powerful tools like Jellyfish and emerging technologies such as advanced AI and predictive analytics, we enable organizations to transform both their engineering processes and product development, boost productivity, and drive measurable outcomes that directly impact their bottom line.
