How to Build a Great Engineering Culture
Part One 1: An Overview
Having a strong engineering culture will set your company up for success. However, without deliberate effort, an engineering culture will form independently—and it might not be the one you want. Left unchecked, neglecting your engineering culture can spiral into inefficiency, eroded morale and, ultimately, failure. So how do you ensure it’s the right one?
When I joined a tech scaleup, I noticed the lack of a strong engineering culture. Individually, most of the people were capable, but together they were not working effectively. Engineers were working in isolation without any concept of a team, let alone high-performing teams. Communication had undertones of aggression, and quality issues meant half of the team was allocated to fixing bugs. Across the eight engineers, there were six different titles without any clear progression path or promotion consistency. Crafting an engineering culture that fit with the company values, where the company was on a significant growth journey, was key.
The next few years were a wild ride. We built and released new products, improved the platform's reliability, security, and quality, drastically increased our customer base, and nearly tripled revenue. We also significantly scaled the engineering team while embedding the new culture.
Reflecting on my experiences there, it was humbling to hear the lasting impact that this carefully crafted culture – centred around people, customer focus, growth, humility, collaboration, and transparency – has had since I left. Team members at all levels told me that the culture was the highlight of their experience, with many joining because of it. There is recognition from all levels of seniority across the company that these cultures don’t just happen - it takes an engineering leader who is passionate and cares about people, understands how to build high-performing teams and, importantly, can drive necessary change through the business.
I’ve had the privilege of being part of multiple other strong engineering cultures. Every time, building it was intentional, requiring deliberate effort from many people, as well as careful planning and execution over time. I have also worked in or seen many other companies that haven’t managed this. One of the common things that I experienced was that most people working in sub-par engineering cultures did not recognise that they were. They did not understand how bad the culture was, how much it cost them or how much better they could be.
I’ve written this series of articles to share what I learnt about building an engineering culture. To explain the benefits of having a great engineering culture and the concrete things you need to do to build one. This first article will help explain what an engineering culture is and its importance, as well as provide a summary of the series. Subsequent articles will explore the topics in more detail.
This series is intended for engineering leaders looking to build an engineering culture from scratch or strengthen an existing culture. It will also be valuable for engineers at all levels looking to understand how to influence their engineering culture, as well as other senior stakeholders wanting to understand the different facets of a strong engineering culture.
What is an Engineering Culture, and why is it important
Engineering culture refers to the shared values, behaviours, and practices that shape how engineers work and make decisions. It influences their performance and, ultimately, the company’s success.
A strong engineering culture is the backbone of any successful technology-driven company. When done well, it fosters innovation, productivity, and alignment with business goals. It attracts and retains talent by offering growth, belonging, and meaningful contributions, creating a career-defining workplace. Weak cultures can cause low morale, higher turnover, slower decisions, and inefficiency, threatening team and company success.
Multiple studies show the significant impact of strong engineering cultures: Glassdoor found that over half of workers prioritise culture over salary, McKinsey linked strong cultures with 4-5x faster revenue growth, and Harvard Business Review reported companies with strong engineering cultures had 2.5 times the revenue growth compared to weaker ones.
A strong engineering culture significantly enhances the potential for success of the engineering team within the company; however, it is not a guarantee of success on its own. To have a successful engineering department, one needs to consider the following areas:
People
Product
Technology
Delivery
Engineering culture does relate to all of these areas but mostly applies to the people area, so as we delve into these articles, we won’t delve into all of the details of Product, Technology and Delivery in depth (we’ll cover the aspects of them that relate to culture).
How much can a poor engineering culture cost
The impact of poor engineering cultures goes far beyond the engineering team – it affects the entire company. In a great culture, the team produces results greater than the sum of its parts. Engineers collaborate, learn from each other, and thrive, creating a multiplier effect that drives the department, and the business, forward.
But in a poor culture, the opposite happens. The team detracts from individual contributions, creating inefficiencies that ripple through the organisation, as illustrated by the image below. Even highly capable individuals may struggle and fail in a weak culture.
A Detailed Example: Slow Progress on Too Many Projects
At one startup I joined, twelve engineers struggled across ten projects under a single task allocator lacking clear prioritisation. Engineers worked in isolation, without collaboration, unified vision or customer focus, and the excessive concurrent work resulted in a lack of traction on any of the projects.
This inefficiency had real business consequences: Due to slow progress, the company struggled to win and retain clients, and frustrated engineers began to leave, creating a vicious cycle of attrition, delays, and the costly process of hiring and onboarding replacements.
Another Example: Poor Engineering Practices
At an earlier-stage startup, progress had ground to a halt. Features that once took days to develop were now taking weeks, and quality had plummeted. Major bugs were introduced with every release, and performance issues slowed the entire system.
The root cause was a lack of engineering fundamentals like testing, configuration management, and continuous integration. These gaps led to significant outages when a high-profile customer joined, damaging the company’s reputation. Over time, the inability to deliver on commitments forced the company to downsize its engineering team, a painful decision that could have been avoided with a stronger culture.
Other symptoms of a poor engineering culture
Beyond those specific examples above, poor engineering cultures often have other symptoms:
Pull Request (PR) Ping Pong: Teams bogged down in PR disputes and don’t prioritise reviewing PRs, delaying delivery.
Toxicity: Blame culture or interpersonal conflicts prevent meaningful discussions and buy-in, leading to frustration and high turnover.
Internal Competition: Hoarding information and political maneuvering replace collaboration and trust, stifling innovation and progress.
Hero Culture: Where the company relies on the heroics of key individuals to make the majority of progress, preventing knowledge transfer and collaboration, as well as creating single points of failure for the business.
Technology for Technology's Sake: Also known as resume-driven development, where a lack of customer focus and governance results in developers focusing purely on the technology instead of customer outcomes.
Ignoring Technology: Engineering decisions are dictated solely by non-technical stakeholders, ignoring technical debt or feasibility, frustrating developers, slowing progress over time and leading to unachievable commitments.
Copying-and-pasting Processes: When people force processes from different contexts onto their new context (e.g., “Let’s install the Spotify Model”), this often results in inappropriate, heavyweight, and unnecessary processes, which in turn results in overhead, bureaucracy, and slowdown.
Just Tell Me What to Build: Engineers want to be directed on what to do without understanding the ‘why’ or the customer, often leading to suboptimal solutions.
And many more.
In many cases, the individuals in these environments were talented and capable, yet the culture held them back. A poor culture doesn’t just waste potential – it actively erodes it.
How to build a great engineering culture
A good framework to use to build a great engineering culture involves the following steps
Embody and champion the values
Elicit feedback on the culture and course-correct
Subsequent articles in this series will cover each of those steps in more detail, but below is a high-level overview.
How to define a great engineering culture
Great cultures are generally centred around a growth mindset, people-centricity, humility, transparent communication, collaboration, and a desire to deliver customer value. However, there isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach, so defining your desired culture is essential. You need to have strong enough self-awareness to understand the current organisational context and define an aspirational culture that can succeed. The second article of this series will cover how to define your culture in detail based on your context, what makes a great culture, and why.
How to embed and codify the values and culture
Embedding is about making the culture as pervasive as possible in the company processes. In the hiring process, role descriptions, promotions, recognition, awards, ways of working, and other rituals. Engineering Growth Frameworks (which define how engineers can grow and progress in their careers) can be strong cultural enforcers. Refine your hiring process to help establish your new culture by building a critical mass of values-aligned people. Structure your Ways of Working and rituals to help embed your values and allow them to flourish. Using surveys like Health Checks can help measure the progress and success of your cultural change. The third article of this series will take a deeper dive into how to use your rituals to embed and codify your values.
How to embody and champion the values
Getting your values to take root requires everyone to embody the values strongly. It requires leaders to be walking the talk in everything they do. Team members need to live the values too, which requires the leaders to stamp out behaviours that are misaligned with the desired values and acknowledge aligned behaviours. Leaders need to create an environment where the values can flourish by creating a safe, inclusive environment that caters to diverse needs, fosters greater diversity, involves more team members in discussions and decision-making and ultimately improves performance. In the fourth article of this series, we will cover how to embody and champion values in more detail, as well as how to overcome some key resistances to change stemming from scepticism, low buy-in and involvement, or lack of capability.
How to get feedback on your culture and course-correct
Implementing your desired culture requires a clear picture of what is happening in your engineering department. One-on-ones (1:1s) are a key way to get this information and also course-correct. You need to have effective 1:1s with your direct reports and skip-level reports, create a safe space in those 1:1s, and probe into details to preempt any blindspots that you may have around your culture. Once you build trust, you can then ask detailed questions about the other people (including leaders) of the team, any concerns, frustrations, and even questions about ways of working and rituals to help you build up a picture of each product-engineering team, and also any systematic issues across the engineering department. The fifth article of this series will cover how to use 1:1s to further embed and solidify culture.
In Summary
A strong engineering culture requires conscious definition and consistent nurturing to drive success. To do this effectively, you can follow the framework:
Define
Embed
Embody
Feedback
So, think about your engineering culture. Is it pushing your company forward and helping it succeed, or is it holding your company back from success? Do the engineers care about their team and customers, grow, have humility, are transparent, and collaborate effectively together? If not, you probably do not have a great engineering culture and need to spend time building a great one.
Stay tuned for the next article of this series, which will delve into the details of how to define and articulate a great engineering culture.