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Earlier this month, we gathered technical leaders from some of the fastest-growing tech companies across Europe for an insightful exchange of ideas at Future Proof London—our engineering summit for technical founders, Chief Technology Officers (CTOs), and Chief Product Officers (CPOs). The summit was designed to address the complex challenges that engineering teams face as they scale, challenges that often go beyond established frameworks and well-defined metrics.
Engineering leadership today is grappling with a myriad of struggles. The rapid integration of AI into development workflows is not just automating routine tasks, but also has the potential to reshape the entire approach to software development. As companies scale, engineering teams also face inefficiencies like dependencies and misaligned organizational structures. Leaders must constantly reevaluate processes to minimize bottlenecks and ensure engineers remain close to customer needs, while also fostering autonomy and agility within teams.
Balancing efficiency with resilience is another critical challenge. By focusing on organizational design, diverse hiring, and fostering collaboration across teams, leaders can work to strike a balance between these two qualities, allowing their organizations to innovate and adapt quickly while maintaining stability.
Through vibrant discussions ranging from engineering resilience to AI-driven transformation, the summit provided insights into how today’s technical leaders are addressing these multifaceted challenges. Below, explore all the key takeaways from the summit to help you navigate these evolving challenges in your own organization.
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Embracing AI in Engineering
A standout theme of the summit was the role of AI in the future of engineering, a topic that sparked excitement and healthy debate. With the rise of tools like GitHub Copilot and Devin, engineering teams are increasingly using AI to automate tasks like code testing and documentation, potentially freeing engineers to focus on higher-value work.
Sebastian Enderlein, CTO of DeepL, shared that they’ve already seen productivity gains from AI tools, particularly in automating repetitive, low-complexity tasks. While these tools are still in their early days, he believes their potential to reshape engineering work is vast. Emma Burrows, Founder of Portia Labs and former CTO of Stripe UK, added that AI could represent a massive abstraction shift in how software is developed, though she noted concerns that this shift could make it harder for junior developers to enter the workforce.
Despite the promise of AI, the panelists agreed that human engineers won’t be replaced anytime soon. Instead, they believe AI will change the nature of the work engineers do, requiring teams to rethink workflows and develop new skills to complement these emerging technologies.
“I think AI changes the role of the engineer going forward; however it will take much more than 2 years. I think we overestimate how quickly these major shifts will happen and underestimate the longer-term impact. My big concern is when all code is generated by Copilots and they are better at criticizing code than humans are; I find that moment quite scary. And that brings certain problems in terms of changing how we educate engineers in our universities, because right now there are a lot of people who see the value of 80% of it but are able to fix the 20% that is not working right. In the future, junior engineers will have lost that ability to check code.”
Alexander Matthey, Former CTO of Adyen
Innovating Under Constraints
As engineering teams scale, we often find one of the greatest challenges they face is avoiding organizational inefficiency. In today's market, where there is pressure to balance innovation with constrained resources, leaders are tasked with rethinking processes to maintain agility.
Former CTO of Adyen, Alexander Matthey underscored the issue of dependencies, where engineers often find themselves waiting on approvals or blocked by other teams. At Adyen, they’ve had to consistently reevaluate their processes at different stages of growth to minimize these bottlenecks. Emma echoed this sentiment, noting that organizational structures often outgrow themselves, necessitating constant reevaluation.
“Software moves so fast that you outgrow that org design/structure very quickly. So it’s kind of part of the job to constantly need to reinvent and figure out ways to reduce those inefficiencies. An additional inefficiency is that as your organizations grow, your engineers get further and further away from the product and the customer problems they are solving. They are not close enough to the users to know that they are building the right thing.”
Emma Burrows, Founder of Portia Labs & Former CTO of Stripe UK
Sebastian added that a lack of autonomy is another significant source of inefficiency. When engineers don’t have clearly defined roles and responsibilities, it becomes difficult for them to take initiative and move projects forward. Sebastian believes these issues requires a thoughtful approach to organizational design, ensuring that teams have the autonomy and clarity they need to operate efficiently.
On the topic of developer productivity, Emma emphasized that while tracking performance metrics is important, it’s crucial to avoid over-relying on a single north star metric. Alexander shared that at Adyen, they focus on customer-centric metrics, ensuring that engineering teams are always aligned with delivering value to the end user.
“We want every team to think deeply about their SLOs and it has to tie back to customer value. Different teams will have very different angles in terms of touching the customer, but it has to be a common theme that is shared by all. And then there are the metrics around reliability to ensure we drive a certain behavior.”
Alexander Matthey, Former CTO of Adyen
Building Antifragile Organizations
Featuring insights from Matt Eccleston, former VP of Growth at Dropbox, Mike Curtis, former VP of Engineering at Airbnb, and Jeff Rothschild, former VP of Engineering at Facebook, all of whom serve as advisors on our Technical Advisory Board, we also unpacked the concept of organizational fragility and strategies for building more resilient and enduring engineering teams.
Matt shared a poignant story from his time at Dropbox when a database failure led to a company-wide outage. The recovery process took over 24 hours and required a heroic team effort. This moment, however, became a defining one for Dropbox’s engineering culture. The team adopted a rigorous, blameless incident review process, ensuring that each failure was treated as a learning opportunity and helped the company evolve into a more robust, resilient organization.
Building organizational resiliency involves iterations across people, processes, and technology. It’s critical to find the right level of investments in resiliency relative to your company’s scale and stage of growth. In terms of people, Jeff highlighted the importance of building teams that reflect diverse perspectives, cautioning against the tendency to hire in one’s own image—a phenomenon he called “mirror-tocracy.” He explained how creating a resilient organization requires consciously hiring people with different skills and experiences, rather than those who fit a predefined mold.
The panelists also agreed that as organizations scale, the role of engineering leadership also evolves. As you start to introduce layers of management in the organization, communication becomes a core aspect of the job of an engineering leader. As such, leaders need to frame the decisions an engineering organization is making in a way that makes sense to the rest of the team.
“The communication of what’s important, what success looks like, and how we measure progress on those goals becomes a big part of the engineering leader’s day-to-day. This way, people understand what they should be doing and what their incentive is to do it. Another inflection point is when you need to develop the skillset to operate cross-functionally. A big part of the job becomes “how do I set my team up for success,” and as the company grows that means coordinating with your sales, finance, design teams.”
Mike Curtis, ICONIQ Growth Technical Advisory Board
The conversation also covered the balance between efficiency and resilience, emphasizing that building resilient organizations does not mean sacrificing speed or innovation. In fact, it was argued that resilience is often what enables faster iteration and the ability to recover more quickly from setbacks. For example, engineering teams can invest in developer hygiene and rigorous hiring processes at the very early stages to enable the organization to move faster in the long run.
Looking Ahead
The discussions highlighted the importance of collaboration, continuous learning, and adapting to the ever-changing landscape of technology. If you’d like to continue learning, you can explore our recent research on engineering efficiency, organizational design, and compensation. We look forward to continuing the conversation and working together to solve the challenges facing the next generation of tech innovators.
Published:
October 31, 2024
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