How to Create and Run High-Performance Engineering Teams

When building a high-performing engineering team, you shouldn't just focus on technical skills or meeting deadlines. Instead, try pointing your attention to creating an environment where your entire team thrives.

You want a team that collaborates seamlessly, takes ownership, and delivers exceptional results consistently. But achieving this level of performance doesn’t happen by chance. It requires clear focus, the right tools, and a shared commitment to continuous improvement.

By the end of this blog post, you’ll walk away with practical advice, actionable steps, and insights into the critical drivers that shape team performance. You'll see how to empower your team to go the extra mile and succeed.

Let's get started.

Why High-Performance Engineering Teams Are Important

High-performance engineering (HPE) teams are the backbone of delivering outstanding results in software development. When you build a development team that collaborates effectively, takes ownership, and stays aligned with business goals, you get many benefits.

These benefits go beyond faster delivery to more innovation, better motivation, and your company’s long-term success. Here’s why building high-performance teams should be your priority:

• Better quality software: Teams with high collaboration standards see up to 81% improvement in overall performance. You’ll see higher performance in everyday outputs, like fewer bugs and smoother code reviews, but also in outcomes regarding user satisfaction and your company’s growth.
• Faster time to market: Reducing delays means coming up with faster solutions that set you apart from the competition. An efficient team can do that – and it’s not just about good collaboration. While collaborative activities among managers and team members have increased by over 50% in the last two decades, that’s not necessarily good. Although we’re breaking barriers in terms of frontline connection gaps, it proves the growing need for seamless teamwork.
• Better innovation: When your team feels supported and autonomous, they think outside the box and deliver solutions that truly make a difference.
• Impact on morale, retention, and company success: High-performance teams thrive in a supportive environment because it boosts retention and creates a culture where talented people want to stay and grow.

High-Performance Engineering Habits

Building high-performance engineering teams starts with adopting habits that stick. Identifying areas for improvement is not enough; you need practical steps that your team can consistently follow.

Small, repeatable actions create lasting change, and when done right, they can transform how your team collaborates, innovates, and performs. Let’s break down the habits you can build into your team’s workflows to improve performance.

1. Have Clear Goals

Clear goals give your team direction and purpose. When everyone knows what they’re working toward, collaboration becomes smoother, and results improve.

Studies show that 90% of people perform better when working toward specific and challenging goals. Additionally, clear objectives can boost employee motivation by an incredible 14.2 times.

To make this work, you can incorporate team-wide goals into retrospectives and sprint planning. Whether delivering a key feature or tackling tech debt, aligning your team on well-defined goals gives them the focus they need to succeed.

As an engineering leader, you set the tone by ensuring every goal ties back to overarching company objectives.

2. Embed HPE into Workflows

Your workflows should naturally support high-performance habits. Adding HPE-focused tasks to sprint planning and backlog refinement can help your team focus on both immediate priorities and long-term improvements.

HPE-focused tasks are deliberate activities you do to improve the efficiency, quality, and effectiveness of your engineering efforts. Examples include:

• Regular code reviews: Facilitate systematic code evaluations to maintain quality and share knowledge among team members.
• Refactoring sessions: Allocate time to improve existing code structures without altering external behavior. This is great for improving maintainability.
• Performance testing: Conduct tests to assess and optimize the application's responsiveness and stability under various conditions.
• Technical debt assessment: Identify and prioritize areas of the codebase that require improvement to prevent future issues.
• Backlog refinement sessions: Review and update the product backlog regularly to ensure your tasks are well-defined, prioritized, and aligned with current project goals. Experts recommend spending up to 10% of your team’s capacity on backlog refinement, which has been shown to improve understanding and performance during sprints.

Incorporating these tasks into sprint planning helps your team balance immediate priorities with long-term improvements. 

Of course, HPE-focused tasks demand specific metrics to monitor progress and ensure alignment with high-performance objectives. Tracking code coverage, identifying tech debt, or measuring velocity are good examples because they’re directly tied to outcomes, not output. Including these metrics in your definition of “done” ensures that quality is baked into every sprint.

3. Use Cues and Environment

Sometimes, small reminders can make all the difference. So, try adding agenda items for retrospectives or one-on-one meetings to review progress toward high-performance goals. You can also use metrics dashboards to bring transparency into your daily workflow so your team can track their progress without extra effort.

The environment also plays a critical role. We encourage you to create a high-performance environment where your team feels supported, empowered, and focused. Good habits naturally follow when the environment aligns with your team’s goals.

4. Do Continuous Improvement

High-performing teams are always improving. Regularly reviewing HPE goals in team meetings keeps these initiatives alive and actionable. You should highlight progress during sprint demos or retrospectives to show how far your team has come.

For example, if your team improves code coverage by 15% in a sprint, you should celebrate it. These moments of reflection and recognition keep momentum high and reinforce the culture of continuous improvement.

5. Ensure Actionable Steps

Discussions about goals or improvements are only helpful if they lead to action. After every meeting or discussion, you should assign clear responsibilities to specific team members. This ensures that ideas aren’t lost and progress is made consistently.

For instance, if reducing tech debt is a priority, assign someone to track and address it during the next sprint. Axify allows you to monitor these action items and ensure accountability across your team.

Challenges That Stop Your Team from Becoming High-Performance

Even the most talented teams face challenges that hold them back from reaching their full potential. Whether it’s balancing innovation with deadlines, staying aligned, or managing burnout, these hurdles can feel overwhelming.

But the good news is that you can overcome them with the right strategies and tools. Let’s discuss these challenges and see how you can tackle them effectively.

It’s Hard to Balance Innovation with Delivery Timelines

Innovation is important, but tight delivery timelines typically push it aside. Creativity and problem-solving can take a back seat if your team is always rushing to meet deadlines.

A McKinsey survey found that 84% of executives see innovation as critical to their growth strategy, yet 80% feel their current business models could be disrupted soon.

If you’re facing the same issue, here's what you can do:

• Dedicate 20% of your team’s time each week or iteration to innovation. This could be checking out new tools, experimenting with frameworks, or improving processes.
• Focus on delivering one improvement item per sprint. Even small wins build momentum over time.
• Reserve time after major releases or quarterly reviews for productivity-focused sessions. Giving your team space to think and innovate leads to better long-term results.

You Need Alignment Between Team Members and Leadership

Misalignment between your team and leadership can cause confusion and slow progress. As an engineering manager, it’s your job to connect the dots between your team's work and the business goals. Without this connection, your efforts might feel disconnected from the bigger picture.

Axify bridges the gap by translating engineering metrics into business impact. It gives you data that’s easy to share with stakeholders and helps you align your team’s efforts with company priorities. Decisions happen faster when everyone is on the same page, and your team can focus on meaningful work.

To Ensure a Sustainable Pace, Handle Burnout First

Burnout is a silent productivity killer. It creeps in when your team is stretched too thin or feels overwhelmed by constant deadlines.

According to a 2023 Future Forum study, 42% of the global workforce reported experiencing burnout. That’s almost half of all employees feeling drained and unmotivated.

Here's how you can address it:

• Axify’s Team Well-Being Tracker provides real-time insights into your team’s stress levels. Monitoring these signals allows you to intervene before burnout escalates into a larger problem.
• Encourage your team to take regular breaks and maintain a sustainable pace. A healthy team is a productive team, and this starts with you creating a safe environment where balance is a priority.

There’s Always Resistance to Change You Need to Overcome

Change is never easy. You might face resistance when introducing new habits, workflows, or tools to your team. But as famously said:

You should show your team how new tools or habits will make their lives easier. For example, Axify’s intuitive dashboards simplify tracking and goal setting, tying your performance metrics to objectives. This removes the complexity of improvement efforts. When your team gets good value from change, they’ll naturally adopt it.

Measure Performance Without Creating Unhealthy Competition

Tracking performance is important, but focusing too much on individual output can backfire. It creates a culture of unhealthy competition, where team members prioritize their own results over collaboration.

We developed Axify because we understand this problem. Our tool focuses on team metrics, not individual stats. This way, you can improve the collective performance of your entire team (not ranking developers or promoting short-term wins).

You can create a more supportive and productive environment by focusing on collaboration and long-term efficiency.

How to Evaluate If Your Team Is Performing Well

“You can’t improve what you don’t measure” is a famous quote attributed to Peter Drucker. Although some might doubt its origin, while others might dislike it, we agree with its spirit. 

Evaluating your team’s performance helps you track progress and understand where things are working and where they’re falling short.

Focusing on key metrics and insights allows you to build a clear picture of how well your team is functioning and where you need to adjust. Here's what you should focus on to see if your team is doing well.

Track Key Metrics That Matter

DORA metrics give you a direct view of your team’s efficiency and quality of work. These include:

• Deployment frequency: How often are you shipping updates? High-performing teams aim for frequent, small deployments that reduce risk and allow for quick feedback.
• Lead time for changes: Measure how long it takes from committing code to deploying it. A shorter lead time means your team is agile and responsive.
• Failed Deployment Recovery Time (formerly known as MTTR): When issues arise, how quickly can your team recover? Fast recovery times reflect strong processes and collaboration.
• Change failure rate: A lower change failure rate indicates high-quality software deployments and a reliable and stable software product.