I started this project as part of my journey at Creditas as Engineering Manager and later as Head of Engineering, back in 2022.
As a technical leader with six teams and more than 40 engineers, making educated decisions in a fast moving environment were challenging and frustrating.
We adopted a lot of the concepts from Team Topologies by Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais to enable fast flow of change, and a key aspect that guided our decision making was the team cognitive load.
In particular, we leveraged the Team Cognitive Load Assessment by Team Topologies and adapted to our needs.
The more we used the assessment, we acknowledged that:
- Taking into account team cognitive load during the decision making improves organizational fast flow of change.
- Measuring and keeping a relevant historic of team cognitive load is challenging and hard to scale to the whole organization.
The outcomes of using team cognitive load paid all the manual work implied, stuff like:
- Team members moving from one team to another.
- New people joining.
- People leaving.
- New teams being created.
- Teams being merged.
- Discontinuing teams.
Imagine maintaining all those relationships on Google Sheets. This manual work, usually done by the team leaders, created a barrier for a further adoption within our organization.
And being honest, I can understand that many people cannot handle all this manual work to make educated decisions when they are under pressure. Old practices stick.
Yet, imagine if you could measure the impact of the decisions on team cognitive load for the whole organization.
Starting teamcognitiveload.com
Purpose
Remove all the friction to measure all teams cognitive load to be
ready to make meaningful decisions and measure their impact over time,
reducing the feedback loop from decision to visible outcomes.
Technology leaders face vital questions in their journey where they need to make a decision which the outcome is hard to predict and harder to measure. You probably made some of the next questions.
- Should we create a team here or split this one?
- How do we measure the impact of a Platform Team?
- Why that team velocity is reliable and that one people are leaving?
- Why all the sudden this team performs better?
- Why all the sudden this team performs worse?
- If we start pushing for cross-functional teams, which are the areas of friction?
- Why our lead time is that high?
I want team cognitive load application to help you to:
- Have the information to make meaningful decisions.
- Measuring their impact and reduce the feedback loop to correct if necessary before more damage is done.
Most of the time, there is no right decision to make but a bet. Betting in one direction without a fast feedback loop leads us to bad scenarios that we could have avoided with the right feedback loops.
This is the key element that team cognitive load provides. Avoid paralysis per analysis. Make an educated decision, and use team cognitive load application to know if you are going in the right direction.
For whom
I expect the application to help:
- C-level
- VPs and Heads of Engineering
- Engineer Manager
- Tech Leads