Crafting Zen Moments

It was just another usual work morning with Jana, our CTO and the team in the conference room. We discussed the progress and updates of our engineering management platform- HORUS. As each engineering team member began talking about the wearying hassles in nurturing the little kid that HORUS was, Jana shared a fascinating read he stumbled upon recently – Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance, a book by Angela Duckworth.

In her book, Angela talks about “deliberate practice”. Now, if you ask what’s so interesting about that – “deliberate practice requires focused attention and is conducted with the specific goal of improving performance.”

After Jana gave us the ‘deliberate practice’ pep talk, all of us were left with a puzzled expression on our face, wondering what’s Grit got to do with HORUS?

Post the meeting, and with short bursts of grit, we go back to working on HORUS and honing its features. While we all were still in the grit hangover, we got a mail from Vasu, our President & Chief-Consultant, with a subject line that read – “Do you measure your engineering grit?” 

Inside was this treasure trove:

What does “deliberate practice” mean to an engineering organization?

Just like an athlete doing deliberate practice every single day and improving to meet his/her goal of making it to the Olympics, can different personas of an engineering organization measure performance?

For example, how can hundreds of engineers who contribute to software development every single day know how their work is making a difference to the business? How can they measure performance improvement for the number of code check-ins they do every day? Are the standard metrics for measuring developer efficiency providing them with that information?

What does deliberate practice mean to technical leads and managers that are guiding and monitoring these engineers?

CXO’s often talk about how their products make a difference in the market but does a CTO or a VP(Engineering) today have a way to connect their engineering organization’s work to the business? Is there a way to measure engineering grit and present it to CXO in a meeting to help him understand how “engineering grit” has improved the user experience for the customers?

In summary, can the business vision of the CEO be tied to every level below within the organization?

Starting with the CIO, CTO, VP of Engineering, Directors, Managers, Leads, Engineers, and so on, can it translate to everyone? Is there a way for each persona to know how their work impacts business with data? Yes, Zuci’s digital enablement solution HORUS makes it possible.

To cut a long story short, this is how the Grit score made its way into HORUS’ features. Today, we have 15 such grit scores to measure the engineering excellence of an organization.

Jana enabled the entire thought process by planting the seed of grit into the team. Vasu empowered that thought with his email that added perspective to that thought. The entire team exemplified the grit that Jana spoke of to realize it as a feature of HORUS.

That is how the Zen moment of HORUS’ grit score got created.