Why CognitiveLoad.dev
Your teams' Cognitive Load varies from week to week. Timely feedback loops are essential to Fast Flow of Change
I ordered Team Topologies in late 2019.
Since then, I have advocated for the concepts and ideas in my day-to-day work. In small companies of less than 20 folks to big organizations of more than 4.000 employees.
Learned a lot since then. Made mistakes, learned from them. I debated with awesome people on how they were applying the concepts and, more importantly, how they knew if they were going on the right path.
We were doing as we could. It was an aggregation of:
Listening to the team members.
4 Key Metrics.
Manual Surveys to Measure Cognitive Load.
Gut feeling.
We all felt that the Feedback Loop was longer than we wanted to know if we were going on the right path.
What happened to me
Developers, Leaders, and Organizations react slowly to the Teams’ needs due to the lack of the proper tooling to capture information regularly to:
Make sensible, timely decisions
Understand the outcomes of the decision
A real-world scenario of mine
I worked at Creditas as an Engineering Manager of 3 teams when we decided to start a Platform Team. How did we do it?
We received developers’ complaints in different areas.
Not enough stable systems.
Slow on shared components.
Technical debt is addressed multiple times in at least two teams.
We ran the Team Cognitive Load Assessment of Team Topologies Authors.
We wanted to know which area was the most problematic and impacted our developer experience.
We verified that our teams had a high cognitive load in certain areas.
Operation of the systems.
All teams are addressing inner shared systems complexity.
Bet on starting a Platform Team.
It was vital to have people with a Product Mindset.
Developers in Platform Team needed to take the mandatory course of Platform as a Product of Team Topology Authors.
Measuring the Platform Team Impact with Proxy Metrics.
Stability of the systems.
Cycle Time of Stream-Aligned Teams.
It turned out to be a great decision with excellent outcomes. Thank you to all the people who made all their best! Those decisions are nothing if people don’t believe in them and commit! You all make it possible 🧡
The problem
We took a lot of time to identify a High Cognitive Load on teams.
We identified it during our 1:1s with our Engineers Leaders.
What if we had a tool that automatically captures this feedback from the engineering team?
Running the Team Cognitive Load Assessment was manual, and modeling the data took time.
This required doing some training on leadership regarding Team Topologies concepts.
Then discuss how to capture those concepts from scratch.
Entirely manual and tedious to maintain.
It required constant training of new joiners to know how to run them.
The knowledge is lost when some team member leaves the organization.
Measuring Platform Team Impacts made with Proxy Metrics.
Unable to gather weekly feedback if the Cognitive Load on Team’ decreased over time.
The following Cognitive Load Survey was done at the end of the quarter.
3 months later!
This was due to the cost of running surveys manually.
At least measuring the Proxy Metrics was good enough to see it was an excellent decision to start the Platform Team.
Why I’m doing cognitiveload.dev
Everything is about Developer Experience.
As an engineer and leader, I care about the Developer Experience. I do believe it heavily impacts how we delight our customers with the products we create.
We lack the proper tooling to measure our Cognitive Load to make timely and educated decisions on improving it.
It frustrates me as a leader when we make blind decisions that impact our people and customers on only gut feeling just because there is no better alternative.
That’s why I started CognitiveLoad.dev! Make better-informed decisions based on Teams Cognitive Load and then measure the impact! 🧡
CognitiveLoad.dev is the alternative to blind/gut feeling decision-making.
