debugging your culture

Table of Contents

Key Takeaways

• A strong engineering culture is key to team success and productivity.
• Celebrating small wins and continuous improvement boosts morale and ownership.
• Building trust through transparency and accountability leads to better collaboration.
• Healthy team cultures are more adaptable and resilient during change.
• Start with small changes—every improvement strengthens your team’s foundation.

When teams struggle, the first instinct is often to look at the tools or the codebase. Maybe the CI/CD needs streamlining, or there’s too much tech debt slowing things down. But what if the real problem isn’t technical at all?

Engineering culture - the values, habits, and practices that guide how a team works - can be the silent force driving your success or creating constant friction.

Debugging your culture isn’t as straightforward as fixing a bug, but the rewards are far greater. A healthy culture brings trust, promotes continuous improvement, and ultimately leads to teams that are more productive and adaptable.

The Foundation of Success

Good engineering practices are the backbone of a strong culture. They ensure quality, maintain consistency, and give teams the confidence to move fast without breaking things. But these practices only bring results if they’re built collaboratively and collectivley embraced by everyone.

Start with small, impactful habits:

• Commit to Code Reviews: Create a culture where reviewing code is seen as a collaborative way to learn, not just a gatekeeping exercise.
• Automate Where Possible: Automate repetitive tasks to free up time for solving real problems, showing the team their time is valued.
• Prioritise Knowledge Sharing: From shared documentation to regular knowledge-sharing sessions, investing in team-wide understanding reduces silos and strengthens collaboration.

Empower teams to work smarter not just harder.

Rewarding Continuous Improvement

Teams thrive when they feel their efforts are recognized.

Celebrating small wins, like reducing technical debt or improving test coverage, reinforces the importance of continuous improvement.

For example, one engineering team I worked with introduced a mural board where developers could highlight small but impactful improvements they’d made during their sprint. Whether it was simplifying a piece of logic or optimizing a database query, these contributions were celebrated in retrospectives.

Over time, this not only improved the codebase but also brought a sense of ownership and pride to the bigger picture - not just the single features worked on and delivered that sprint.

True continuous improvement means creating a feedback loop where teams feel motivated to keep making things better.

Building Trust

Trust is the foundation of any healthy culture. Without it teams become guarded, processes slow down, and creativity suffers. Building trust starts with leadership but requires effort at every level of the organisation.

So how can you build trust?

• Be Transparent: Share the “why” behind decisions, even the tough ones. Teams are more likely to engage when they understand the bigger picture.
• Encourage Experimentation: Allow room for failure. Teams that know they won’t be blamed for trying new things are more willing to innovate.
• Show Accountability: Leaders who own up to their mistakes create an environment where others feel safe doing the same.

When trust becomes part of your culture, teams communicate openly, collaborate effectively, and solve problems faster.

The Rewards of Debugging Your Culture

Investing in your culture pays dividends in ways that go far beyond morale. Teams with a strong culture will be:

• More Productive: Clear processes and trust reduce bottlenecks, enabling faster delivery.
• More Adaptable: Teams that value continuous improvement can pivot quickly when priorities change.
• More Resilient: A collaborative and transparent culture can weather challenges without fracturing.

A standout example of this is the “Squad” model. By giving teams autonomy and creating a culture of accountability, Spotify scaled its engineering practices without losing its innovative edge. Teams trusted each other to deliver, and that trust fueled rapid experimentation and consistent growth.

Learn more about building high-performing teams in Healthy Squads Are Happy Squads

Start Small, Think Big

Better culture doesn’t require sweeping changes overnight. Start with one or two areas where your team struggles; whether it’s transparency, collaboration, or improving workflows.

Every step toward a healthier culture strengthens your team’s foundation, enabling them to deliver their best work.

Summary

Just like debugging code, it’s an iterative process, but the results are worth the effort.

What’s one small change you can make today to start debugging your culture?