Labs: The Magic of Compound Efficiencies in Engineering

**Yishai Beeri** (0:00)
But day to day, if you're not in the loop, and you're not the one that has the ongoing awareness, that's not going to work.
And with developers, it's the same. If the VP or a senior manager is looking at reports and looking at metrics saying there are inefficiencies, the problem is here, they could try to move the needle by saying, hey, let's fix this. That's a long process. And if the developers are not aware day to day of the same problem in a way that can also react to, that's not gonna work.

**Conor Bronsdon** (0:31)
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Welcome to another Labs episode of Dev Interrupted. In these episodes, we dive into the most impactful research and insights about engineering, and most importantly, how to apply them to your organization. I'm your host, Conor Bronsdon, and today's topic is one the data team at LinearB has a unique authority to speak on. Because they've spent all of their time providing visibility into the development workflow process, they've unearthed parts of the software development pipeline that seem to be taking way too long, and they've experimented with tools and ideas that have helped dev teams program workflows and make these problem areas more efficient. In this episode, we're going to be talking about what these efficiencies are and the compounding effect they can have on your entire organization when you implement them together.
For example, we'll be discussing a way dev teams have cut cycle time by 60%, but only after they implemented another efficiency that previously cut cycle time almost 47%. In short, this episode is all about the power of compounding efficiencies and engineering. For those of you who've read Atomic Habits, you may be familiar with the concept building these habits within teams or your personal life to compound efficiencies, and we're going to run through these efficiencies so that you can layer them on top of one another to completely change the way your organization works and improve productivity.
To walk me through the places we found room for improvements in dev pipelines, ways to create efficiencies, and their overall impact, I've got LinearB's CTO, Yishai Beeri with me. Yishai, welcome to the show.

**Yishai Beeri** (2:39)
Hey, it's good to be here.

**Conor Bronsdon** (2:41)
It's great to have you back. I really enjoyed our last episode we did together around the best programming languages for dev workflow.
I'd love to start by diving into where all this research comes from. Yishai, can you tell us a bit about where all the information that we're going to talk about today was sourced from?

**Yishai Beeri** (2:57)
Sure. So, yeah, in LinearB, we're fortunate to have access to the workflows and the data coming from thousands of dev teams on our free offering, on our paid offerings. And we have a unique window into understanding what's happening in the PR process, what's happening throughout the development process, where the bottlenecks are.
So, yeah, we can see millions of PRs, thousands or tens of thousands of developers and thousands of teams, a lot of data that helps us understand how this looks in smaller teams, large orgs, different behaviors, like you mentioned, programming languages. So a wealth of data in my data team is spending its time picking through that to surface insights about the things we care about. This is about how to improve the developer experience and how to improve productivity by removing those bottlenecks.

**Conor Bronsdon** (3:48)
And there's a great analogy for how you're improving the efficiency for dev teams. And it's something we can all understand. Food. If you ask a nutritionist what is most effective as a diet for losing weight, they might tell you that all diets are effective in helping you lose weight because they give you the visibility into what you're eating. They make you think about it and how much you should be eating.
By being conscious of what you're eating and knowing the right amount of food to consume for your activity level, you'll start to move towards your natural balance and you'll see those opportunities for improvement.