Team velocity and throughput are critical metrics that indicate how quickly a product development team can deliver value. The faster a team can ship high-quality, working software, the more they enable a business to innovate, capture market share, and delight customers. However, speed should not come at the expense of quality, compliance, or technical debt. There is nuance in balancing speed with stability. This post will cover some of the key tactics that product teams can leverage to optimize their workflow, improve productivity, and increase capacity to drive the outputs most important to the business. We’ll define processes that empower people, set clear direction, eliminate distractions, and get to market faster—all while meeting quality standards.
Refine and Update Processes
Legacy processes that made sense years ago may now include practices that slow teams down today as circumstances change. It’s important to periodically re-evaluate existing ways of working to remove unnecessary steps. Conduct process mapping workshops to visualize current workflows. Analyze if any practices duplicate efforts or don’t directly add value. Are there areas that frequently cause bottlenecks? Then explore ways to optimize those processes:
Implementing lean or agile practices like Scrum ceremonies, Kanban boards, and DevOps can dramatically improve team productivity. These frameworks help create efficiencies with planning sprints, breaking down projects, limiting work-in-progress, and continuous delivery. Teams pull work from prioritized backlogs, self-organize around priorities, and establish regular retrospectives to improve how they work.
Visual reporting boards provide transparency for the whole team to see what everyone is working on. Tools like Jira give teams insight into velocity trends over time. Understanding historical throughput sets a benchmark to increase productivity goals each sprint or quarter.
Process inefficiencies sap motivation. Teams feel empowered when workflows facilitate getting work done end-to-end instead of making things more complicated. Review processes with fresh eyes and optimize regularly. Empower the team to overhaul legacy ways of working that include practices irrelevant to the current environment. Facilitate creativity in designing their team workflow because they best understand pain points and challenges to address.
Empower Teams
While well-designed processes create guardrails for increased throughput, empowered teams produce the output that moves key objectives forward. Teams who lack psychological safety avoid risk and stick to the status quo instead of innovating solutions. Leaders who micromanage create tension and disempower their teams from performing at their highest capacity. Here are ways to enable teams so velocity improves:
Trust – Make trust non-negotiable across the organization and model vulnerability and accountability as a leader. Admit mistakes, take ownership to fix them, and follow through consistently. Give public appreciation when teams and colleagues deliver excellent results. Build personal connections so teammates know you care about them professionally and personally. Trust then flows both ways.
Autonomy – Providing autonomy around how a team gets work done unlocks immense motivation. Within agreed-upon standards, give teams agency around work schedules, meeting rules, team rituals, collaboration norms, and other working guidelines. Encourage teams to self-organize workflows, responsibilities, and rhythms that maximize productivity. This sense of control creates more commitment to a team’s purpose.
Coaching – While autonomy is critical, leaders play a pivotal role in coaching teams and individuals to grow skills, overcome roadblocks, and achieve excellence. Schedule one-on-ones for understanding challenges and designing development plans. Recognize opportunities aligned to each person’s strengths and passions. Handle tough conversations with empathy. Unblock progress by securing extra help, and tools, or clarifying priorities. Great coaching supports teams to flourish.
Resources & Development – While ambitious goals stretch teams, ensure they have sufficient resources, tools, people, and budget to deliver on expected outcomes. Identify capability gaps holding teams back. Offer training and certification to expand technical abilities. Give time for researching solutions and encourage sharing ideas across teams. Enable attendance at conferences for additional learning opportunities. Support ambition with capability development.
Psychological safety and trust coupled with development resources, supportive leadership, and autonomy help teams feel empowered to achieve peak velocity improvements for better productivity and throughput. When operating as a high-performing unit, teams feel confident tackling bigger challenges, innovating breakthroughs, and driving incredible outcomes.
Set Clear Goals
Aligned around a clear strategy and business objectives, setting defined goals for development teams focuses effort on the outputs that matter most. When goals seem vague or employees don’t understand how their work ladders up to company priorities, velocity slows. Teams spin their wheels on lower-value work or duplicate efforts. Without clarity, throughput suffers.
Cascade corporate strategy into quarterly OKRs (objectives and key results) for each product team. Make sure those connect clearly to overarching company goals so that the purpose is clear. Teams should be able to articulate how their objectives contribute to strategic priorities.
Then teams can break down OKRs into manageable chunks that map to specific features or sprint goals. The product manager plays a critical role in setting expectations for what can get accomplished per sprint based on historical velocity and current team capacity. Make sure work intake doesn’t exceed throughput bandwidth so teams can focus on predictable progress vs continuous failure.
There should be direct alignment between company goals, team objectives, and individual performance metrics. When employees can see how their individual contributions help move team and organizational needles, their efforts take on more meaning.
Track velocity trends over time and review as a part of retrospectives. If sprints consistently result in a significant portion of incomplete work, assess root causes and remove barriers that impede consistent throughput. Update planning processes to better calibrate the volume of work based on demonstrated team velocity.
When company strategy cascades clearly into team objectives and individual metrics, the focus zeroes in on the outputs that matter most. Velocity jumps dramatically when effort aligns tightly with established goals.
Automate Where Possible
Technology enables automation so people can focus on more meaningful work that only humans can do. The ultimate velocity improvements come when teams automate repetitive, manual processes and reallocate that saved time to innovation.
Survey employees to call out tedious operations ripe for automation based on activities requiring significant labor without generating business value. Common bottlenecks involve financial reconciliations, customer onboarding, engineering build verification testing, payments processing, and plenty of administrative tasks.
Leverage robotic process automation (RPA) tools to configure software bots that emulate human actions required for completing rules-based tasks across applications. This helps alleviate people from mundane work so they tackle higher value priorities that are better uses of their time and expertise.
Similarly, digitize analog processes by bringing forms, documents, and records into automated workflows. Eliminate paper-based systems and leverage platforms that route information quickly to accelerate turnaround.
Reduce mundane effort spent on planning, tracking, and reporting by utilizing platforms with pre-built automation capabilities instead of manual workarounds. Technology like Monday.com, Atlassian, GitLab, and GitHub provide visibility, context switching reduction and one workflow solutions.
For engineering teams, optimize build verification testing cycles to run automated regression suites in parallel. Leverage containerization with Docker and Kubernetes to simplify environment configurations between stages accelerating deployments.
Implement continuous delivery/deployment (CI/CD) pipelines across the organization to ship smaller changes fast without bottlenecks. Consistently releasing increments of value speeds feedback and feature exposure rather than batched updates.
Evaluate all tasks, identify those adding limited value, and explore ways to shift that burden from staff to automated solutions. The velocity improvements realized are massive.
Balance Quality and Speed
With all the focus on accelerating development velocity, leaders must reinforce that faster throughput should never undermine quality, security, compliance, or technical excellence. Undue haste inevitably results in defects reaching customers, unplanned rework, and other slowdowns. The sustainable speed must balance both cycle time improvements and stable systems.
Build quality control steps into existing team workflows to catch issues early before they cascade downstream. For example, codify definition of done checklists and code review sign-offs into pull request approvals within Git. Automate integration tests, security scans, and performance testing into CI/CD pipelines to validate changes at every commit. Schedule regular escapes focusing exclusively on paying down technical debt before it limits velocity long term.
Reward behaviors that support both fast pace and high quality with metrics capturing end user value outcomes. For example, track mean time to resolution (MTTR) on production defects and monitor system uptime alongside feature release metrics. Celebrate when teams quickly deliver differentiated customer experiences with elegant, secure, scalable solutions.
Guide teams toward solving root causes for defects before applying pressure to accelerate. If unreasonable deadlines result in sloppy workarounds, recalibrate timeline expectations. Make sure corporate culture allows pushing back on unrealistic goals instead of just delivering poor quality faster.
Reinforce that essential speed comes from repeatable, reliable processes where teams own standards, not individual heroics. Burning out rockstars with unsustainable shortcuts slows future velocity. Design sustainable team pace supporting both productivity and lives outside work.
Great leaders instill across the company that quality is the fastest speed possible long-term. Quick and stable launches build customer trust. Shortcuts just lead to extra rework cycles which sabotages sustainable velocity improvements.
Key Takeaways
The overarching goal in assessing ways to improve team velocity centers first on making sure groups work on the right priorities that align tightly with company strategy and goals. Taking time to intentionally update processes with modern best practices removes friction while empowering teams with agency to manage their own workflows.
Automating repetitive tasks enables the reallocation of that saved time to meaningful innovation. Great technology combined with engaged teammates committed to continuous improvement through regular retrospectives compounds efficiencies over time.
Sustainable speed at scale requires getting quality built into team habits and automated checks so compliance, uptime, and technical excellence become intrinsic across the culture.
As covered through these tactics – refining processes, empowering teams, clarifying goals, automation, and balancing quality – world-class organizations make velocity improvements an ongoing journey instead of a one-time project. They instrument key metrics allowing visibility into throughput trends company-wide. They benchmark against industry leaders, share best practices across teams, and normalize constantly raising the bar on productivity targets in pursuit of excellence.
Conclusion
Team velocity is critically important to product development and technology companies reliant on continuous innovation. But sustainable speed ensures end user value lands intact without compromising standards or quality. Great leaders realize empowered teams owning streamlined processes and clear goals drive breakthrough outputs. They automate repetitiveness so human effort focuses on creativity. And they nurture cultures valuing both pace and quality. As covered through multiple tactics, improving throughput involves cross-functional collaboration and leveraging modern workflows – but when done right – unlocks velocity at scale leading the entire company forward faster.