John Till has a tactic to solve nearly any engineering problem.
“I think that the best solutions come from the people closest to the work,” Till said.
Till is the director of quality engineering at Imprivata and when his team needed to address a problem in the automation framework, he went straight to the experts: the automation team.
“Within a few weeks they collaborated with the quality engineering team members to identify the most important tests to run.”
Trusting the expertise of his teammates is one of the core attributes of culture at Imprivata.
Jamie Maher, a lead engineer at McMaster-Carr, also sees her team’s values put into practice every day. For Maher, that means using SMART goals and clear communication to lead projects to success.
“Projects move forward with more efficiency and clarity and people feel empowered knowing their work ties directly to measurable impact,” Maher said.
Curious to learn more about what it’s really like working on these growing teams? Till and Maher had even more to share about culture that performs.
Imprivata is a cybersecurity company focused on digital identity management.
What recent decision best reflected your values — and what changed as a result?
Recently we faced a challenge with our automation framework's optimization for running lengthy regression test sets. Because of the run time we were unable to use this same framework for detecting issues in a timely manner during feature development and automated test results were lagging behind manual results. I think that the best solutions come from the people closest to the work, so I challenged my automation team to distill the larger test sets into a set of smoke tests that would take one hour to run. Within a few weeks they collaborated with the quality engineering team members to identify the most important tests to run and had a set of smoke tests executing that identified issues before the manual QE testers discovered the defects. This improved overall confidence in our test automation and provided feedback to feature development teams within a business day of a build.
What collaboration habit keeps work moving — and how do you measure it?
The QE leadership team is constantly reviewing test result data to determine how we can improve our efficiency. Our legacy product is the backbone of our business with over 20 years of development history and a ponderous development process. In order to maintain forward momentum in a quarterly release cadence, we must carefully consider what to regression test and we must also do our best to maintain a specific time block for that testing. By reviewing past test results and comparing them to known code changes, we are able to make data-based decisions on where we can ease up on testing with lower risk of escapes into the field.
Successful collaboration in the process requires respecting the voices and concerns of each participant, recognizing that with such a feature rich and mature product no one person can be the sole subject matter expert. So if one of those leads lacks agency, we risk negatively impacting our customers.
How do you recognize impact fairly — and what’s the return on investment?
As a manager of a mid-sized team I have the luxury of being close enough to everyone's work to call out their impact on a personal level through shoutouts at team meetings and on Slack channels and in one-on-ones. I subscribe to the notion that everyone values personalized recognition of a job well done, sometimes more than the monetary recognition we might provide with a spot bonus. I measure the return on that investment by my retention rate. There are various factors contributing to that rate, but I would argue that personalized recognition by one's supervisor is a large factor.
McMaster-Carr is an e-commerce company offering more than half a million products used to keep business in motion.
What recent decision best reflected your values — and what changed as a result?
One recent decision that reflected my values was structuring our project teams around specific SMART goals. It’s helped keep us nimble, tightly scoped and focused on clear outcomes. Projects move forward with more efficiency and clarity and people feel empowered knowing their work ties directly to measurable impact. It’s also made it easier to talk about our work with other software engineering teams, since our goals are clear and progress is straightforward to share.
2 collaboration habits that keep work moving at Mcmaster-Carr
- Daily scrums — We use these 30 minute touchpoints to celebrate progress, elevate and resolve blockers and coordinate changes across the team.
- Weekly synchronous code reviews — We use these meetings to walk through important, complex and wide-reaching changes as a team. These conversations give us a chance to share our mental model for the work, chat through alternatives we considered, receive feedback from our teammates and refine our testing and rollout plans.
We consider these collaborative activities engineering practices that accelerate and amplify our work. Our ability to deliver new features to customers each week comes from our deliberate discipline of working together to elevate outcomes.
How do you recognize impact fairly — and what’s the return on investment?
So much of our work at McMaster-Carr is accomplished by teams operating collaboratively. From project kick‑off to troubleshooting to celebrating wins, we do so as a team. Individual contributions don’t go unnoticed, as an impartial review process via a detailed competency framework ensures impact is recognized and promotions are earned on merit. The results speak for themselves, with strong career growth and many colleagues choosing to spend their entire careers here because they feel valued and treated fairly.
