Do you want to learn how to boost your productivity at individual, team, and organisational levels? If so, this presentation is for you. Individual productivity is about increased focus, frequent feedback, and reduced friction. Team productivity is about “flow over utilisation” and integration. Organisational productivity is about allocating effort, reducing relearning, and taking parallel bets. By the end of this presentation, you will better understand how to improve productivity at different scales and contexts.

1. What does “productivity” really
mean at different levels?
Jason Yip
jchyip@gmail.com
https://jchyip.medium.com/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasonyip/
@jchyip@mastodon.online
@jchyip (Threads, X)

2. Overall Key Points
● Feeling productive is not the same as being
productive – be wary about focusing solely on “developer
experience”
● Productivity is about efficient production of value, not
just throughput of stuff
● There are different strategies for the different levels of
productivity (individual, team, and organisation). Need to
address all of them.

3. 3 Fs for individual productivity
Focus Feedback Friction

4. Focus

5. Multi-tasking feels more responsive…
Could you do A for me? Yes, of course.
Could you do B for me? Yes, of course.
Could you do C for me? Yes, of course.
Could you do D for me? Yes, of course.

6. … and is guaranteed to slow completion times.

7. And context-switching costs make it worse.

8. So focus… but not every every part of a request has
equivalent value… so focus AFTER breaking things down

9. KEY POINT: Productivity is the rate of
value produced per unit of input

10. KEY POINT: Break the work down and focus
on the most valuable stuff, one at a time.

11. Feedback

12. Without feedback, building the wrong thing can feel
productive.

13. KEY POINT: Be careful about
over-emphasising reducing interruptions and
meetings if that undermines feedback.

14. Friction

15. Friction is everything about a task that makes it difficult to
complete.
NOTE: Friction can also
be process-related

16. KEY POINT: Friction is not as important as
focus and feedback, but it can add up AND
affects developer experience.

17. Team productivity isn’t just just adding up
individual productivity. It doesn’t work that
way.
Team productivity isn’t about developer
experience so much as work product
experience.

18. 2 Fs for team productivity
Flow Frequent integration

19. Flow

20. Optimise for flow over utilisation aka “watch
the work product, not the workers”

21. Keeping everyone busy != productivity

22. Keeping everyone busy != productivity

23. Use non-experts to free up experts to focus on bottlenecks

24. Help out with bottlenecks even with partial ability

25. KEY POINT: Watch the work product, not
the workers.

26. Frequent
integration

27. Serial approaches are prone to bottlenecks; parallel
approaches require integration

28. Without frequent integration, working independently can
feel productive.

29. Frequent integration means independent efforts don’t
drift too far apart.

30. Divide and conquer = integration hell

31. Conquer and Divide: Start Together Integrate Frequently

32. KEY POINT: If you parallelise to reduce
bottlenecks, Start Together and Integrate
Frequently

33. Organisational productivity isn’t just just adding up team
productivity. It doesn’t work that way.
Organisational productivity isn’t about the flow of a single
initiative so much as optimising across all initiatives.

34. RAP for organisational
productivity
Relearning Allocation Parallel bets

35. Relearning

36. Learning is good; relearning is waste

37. Tactics to reduce to relearning
● Shared learning sessions (e.g., brown bags, lunch and
learns, demos, retrospectives, post-mortems, etc.)
● Collaborative practices (e.g., pair programming, whole
team programming, architecture decision records, etc.)

38. KEY POINT: Organisations that only need to
learn something once are more productive
than organisations that need to learn the
same thing repeatedly.

39. Allocation

40. High throughput doesn’t matter if it’s mostly on low-value
things

41. KEY POINT: Allocating effort to the right
things can be more productive than
increasing throughput.

42. Parallel bets

43. Iteration won’t save you from a dead end idea

44. The advantage of larger organizations is the ability to take
parallel bets.

45. KEY POINT: Larger organisations can
use parallel bets to buy time.

46. Overall Key Points
● Feeling productive is not the same as being
productive – be wary about focusing solely on “developer
experience”
● Productivity is about efficient production of value, not
just throughput of stuff
● There are different strategies for the different levels of
productivity (individual, team, and organisation). Need to
address all of them.

47. 3 Fs for individual productivity
Focus Feedback Friction

48. 2 Fs for team productivity
Flow Frequent integration

49. RAP for organisational
productivity
Relearning Allocation Parallel bets

50. This presentation was based on 3 blog posts I wrote:
● 3 Fs for individual productivity: Focus, Feedback, Friction:
https://jchyip.medium.com/individual-productivity-is-about-increased-focus-fre
quent-feedback-and-reducing-friction-61d7759b9139
● 2 Fs for team productivity: Flow and Frequent Integration:
https://jchyip.medium.com/team-productivity-is-about-flow-over-utilisation-and
-integration-cf31e3e68659
● RAP for organisational productivity: Relearning, Allocation, Parallel bets:
https://jchyip.medium.com/organisational-productivity-is-about-allocating-effort
-reducing-relearning-and-taking-parallel-a48a10584358

51. Questions?
Jason Yip
jchyip@gmail.com
https://jchyip.medium.com/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasonyip/
@jchyip@mastodon.online
@jchyip (Threads, X)