How do you know that your developers are happy?
Hi I'm Tobias and I'm building software and notion templates.
Right now I'm in the idea / validation phase for a Notion template, that's a checklist for validating if your development team is happy and working on a healthy basis.
I've created three sub parts. In every part, the person doing the assessment should reflect on the current state of the team and what to improve to make it better.
The 3 parts are
Growth
With questions like "Do developers get regular feedback?", "Do you do 1on1 meetings with your developers?" or "Do senior developers have time to teach juniors?"
The idea is to see if your developers are growing, as a person and as a developer, while doing their daily work.
Processes
This is a mainly "technical" part of the checklist with questions like "Do you have a defined Code Review process (PRs, Gitflow etc.)?", "Are there standardized coding guidelines?" or "Do backend and frontend developers use the same defined API definitions? (think shared Typescript types)"
There is a lot of fluff around the actual development process but some things need to be done while developing so your devs are efficient and supported in what they do.
Environment
In this part we're looking at everything that surrounds the developer, physically, mentally and digitally. Questions are "Does your team consist of less than 10 people?", "Do developers have deep focus times during the day / week?" or "Is there a clear roadmap defined?". It also includes a question that regards management: "Does Management update staff regularly on strategic doings & numbers?" cause I think most people want to know this stuff, even when they work 99% in their specific domain.
If your team is awesome, but management pressures every feature like there is no tomorrow. You work in an open floor plan with 20 people around you while doing focus work. You can't do home office because "management thinks we should all be in office again." All things that can ruin a perfectly running dev team. That's what it's is own block here.
Okay enough talking
Getting back to the actual question in the title:
I want to ask YOU GUYS (and gals) about feedback. If you'd like, please tell me YOUR questions / checklist items that are THE THING to check if a team is working happy and efficient. I'm happy about any feedback and anyone participating here will of course receive the finished template for free :)
Greets
Tobias
Interesting approach, Tobias!
Based on my experience, the most critical factor for me and the developers I've worked with is that we need to feel challenged. Many are developers because of that feeling we get when we solve an issue.
As long as we feel challenged, then we feel happy. Of course, other factors also play a role, as you mention in your post.
But challenging tasks are super important. The same types of tasks repeatedly are a no-go for developers.
Awesome, that's a part I haven't really thought about yet!
And I completely agree that that is an issue. I've worked with agencies my whole professional career until this year, so I was often stuck in projects doing the same stuff over and over again. Or just developing software I didn't care about or was very trivial in its core.
This is very hard to get into a checklist like this and have it mean anything but I will certainly try to include it in a meaningful way. Thanks for that feedback!