7 ways to improve the productivity of your development team
What if the systems you rely on to improve the productivity of your development team are actually holding them back? In a world where every company races to release the next big thing, developers face mounting pressure. Yet, despite endless meetings, status updates, and shiny new “productivity” tools, inefficiencies persist.
Here’s the paradox: while technology evolves at breakneck speed, the methods used to measure and improve developer productivity have hardly kept pace. And let’s face it – in a market driven by innovation, inefficiency can mean the difference between leading and falling behind.
The good news? Boosting productivity isn’t about cramming in more tools or longer hours. It’s about working smarter. Let’s explore strategies you can use to streamline workflows and empower your developers to deliver their best.
Why is developer productivity important?
In today’s tech world — marked by budget cuts, talent shortages, and skills gaps — developer productivity has never been more essential. With resources stretched thin, software teams are under pressure to do more with less.
Productive development teams adapt faster, launch features sooner, and maintain quality without needing extra headcount. But this isn’t about squeezing more out of developers; it’s about creating an environment that allows them to focus on impactful work. Optimising workflows, cutting unnecessary meetings, and reducing bottlenecks all contribute to a setup where developers can do their best work without distractions.
High productivity isn’t just a metric; it’s a necessity that keeps projects on track, drives better products, and helps companies stay competitive in a fast-paced market.
So, how can you increase the efficiency of your development team? Let’s put aside foosball tables and different productivity tools for a moment — you’ve probably read about them more times than you cared to. Then, what other innovative strategies and changes can you implement to ensure increased productivity?
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To navigate today’s challenging market conditions, more companies are turning to global talent as a strategic advantage. One common approach is outsourcing, which works well for short-term projects and temporary workload spikes. Of course, since outsourced developers tend to split their time across multiple projects, yours can’t be said to be a priority.
With offshore teams, the engineers are dedicated wholly to your organisation, your values, and your company culture. Ultimately, they’re full-time colleagues and not external support via a third party. And at The Scalers, we act as your partner on the ground to build your team in conjunction with your requirements, and run your admin and operations while you focus on growing your business.
However, should you decide to go it alone, what can you do to maximise the productivity of your development team?
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DOWNLOAD EBOOK7 proven strategies to maximise developer productivity
The following strategies will help you maximise the productivity of your development team. They represent the insights we’ve gained from over a decade of building and scaling more than 80 dedicated teams for our partners.
1. Foster a culture of continuous feedback and upskilling
A Gartner study reveals that IT organisations globally spend over $1.5 trillion annually on IT initiatives. Yet, despite this massive investment, many companies expect developers to learn new technologies and programming languages on their own time and dime.
Unsurprisingly, this approach often falls short of expectations, as developers simply lack the time, resources and motivation to take on additional learning independently. Experienced developers, in particular, may grow too comfortable with specific technologies, limiting their adaptability and innovation.
One strategy you could adopt to combat this issue is to combine structured training with continuous feedback. By investing in both technical skills (like new languages and frameworks) and soft skills (leadership and communication), you build teams that are not only highly skilled but also flexible and collaborative.
Meanwhile, regular skills gap analyses and personalised check-ins add depth, enabling tailored growth plans that address each developer’s needs. This holistic approach builds a culture of support and trust, where developers feel valued, motivated, and engaged. In turn, they’re not only more productive but also more committed to their team’s productivity goals going forward.
Together, continuous feedback and upskilling initiatives create a powerful cycle of growth, where developers are constantly evolving their skills and enhancing their productivity.
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LEARN MORE2. Minimise unimportant tasks
Longer hours don’t necessarily translate to higher productivity – quite the opposite. Productivity improves when teams are relieved of low-value tasks that drain their time, focus, and their coding bandwidth.
Tasks like endless email, unnecessary meetings, and administrative busywork, i.e. the non-essential work trifecta, are the main culprits behind lagging productivity. According to Software’s Global Code Time Report, developers spend a mere 52 minutes coding per day, due to being bogged down by unnecessary meetings and other distractions.
If these numbers are sending shivers down your spine, you’ll be pleased to know there are ways around this issue. For starters, you could streamline your meeting practices; ensuring every meeting has a clear agenda, solid purpose, and actionable takeaways. Swap out those long weekly updates for brisk daily stand-ups, and feel everyone’s calendar breathe a collective sigh of relief. And lastly, reserve email for essential matters, and embrace tools like Slack or Microsoft Teams to keep conversations streamlined and on-point.
Though not a be-all and end-all of your development team’s productivity, automation and task management tools also play a critical role. Make use of them to automate repetitive tasks (e.g., testing, deployment) and use platforms like Jira or Trello to organise work efficiently, cutting down on context-switching and freeing developers to focus on high-impact tasks. Techniques like time-blocking and time-tracking can further optimise focus and reduce multitasking.
By eliminating low-value tasks and optimising workflow, you allow developers to spend more time on what truly matters — increasing the productivity of your development team and driving better results.
3. Create a distraction-free environment
Did you know that on average, it takes 25 minutes to recover from a distraction and focus on the task at hand? Depending on your workspace, different kinds of distractions could prevent your developers from working at their full capacity.
In software, it’s proven that a quiet environment increases concentration levels — leading to an increase in the productivity of your development team. Organisations that focus on creating a work environment that is favourable to the quality of output rather than the quantity, will enjoy higher rates of production.
While some people can work among chatter or noise, others get easily distracted and find it difficult to finish their tasks. When working with remote teams, video calls and screen presentations are a daily occurrence. The last thing you want is for your remote team to miss an importance presentation because of background noise. At The Scalers, we’re not strangers to how the quality of workspace environments impacts developer productivity. That’s precisely why we equip our partners’ developers with noise-cancelling headphones. It may seem like a small change, but it makes a significant difference in creating a distraction-free environment.
4. Align development goals with business objectives
A vital part of improving developer productivity lies in aligning their goals with core business objectives. When developers see how their work impacts company success — whether it’s driving growth, enhancing customer satisfaction, or advancing product innovation — they’re more motivated to deliver meaningful results.
Of course, setting goals is an art in and of itself, which is why it’s best tackled using proven goal-setting frameworks such as SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, time-bound) and OKRs (objectives and key results). Putting these frameworks to use will allow you to establish targets that are actionable, and that connect team activities to the larger objectives of your business.
In case you needed further convincing, you should know that Google (yes, that Google) adopted OKRs in its early days as a way of aligning its fast-growing teams with company-wide objectives. The framework allowed individual team members to understand their role in achieving business goals, and prioritise work that brought them closer to doing so. OKRs have since become key to Google’s culture, helping increase focus, accountability and – you guessed it – productivity (Doerr, Measure What Matters, 2017).
Aligning development work with business objectives isn’t just about setting targets, though. It’s about creating a purpose-driven team that’s focused on high-impact work. When developers see the connection between their efforts and the company’s success, team productivity naturally follows.
5. Streamline documentation
Stack Overflow’s 2024 Developer Survey highlights a major productivity killer in software development: knowledge silos and scattered information. The adverse impact of poorly organised knowledge and lack of documentation practices is so extensive that over half of developers report it disrupting their work, while 30% describe experiencing productivity losses from knowledge silos multiple times a week.
Both knowledge silos – i.e. one team or individual having access to valuable knowledge or insights – and disorganised information force developers to repeatedly reach out to people outside of their team, leading to delays, disrupted workflows, and dependency issues. And while the numbers published by Stack Overflow do well to convey the severity of this problem, its repercussions also extend to hindered innovation, engagement, and even onboarding.
Streamlining documentation with a knowledge base and sharing information regularly are indispensable to your team’s productivity. Though if that’s a bridge you have yet to cross, don’t be discouraged. This is exactly the point at which Atlassian once found itself before fully embracing a “documentation-first” culture.
At Atlassian, everything — from onboarding guides to project updates — is now stored in a single knowledge base. This approach enables their developers to quickly find what they need, troubleshoot independently, and bring new team members up to speed without endless back-and-forth.
With fewer interruptions afforded by streamlined documentation, development teams can focus on actual development work, making documentation a true productivity driver.
6. Find your flow in Agile
One of the biggest productivity hurdles for developers is achieving flow state — that magical zone where they’re so laser-focused on a task that hours fly by, and minor distractions fade into the background. It’s where the real magic happens: high-quality work and complex problem-solving. Of course with constant pings, meetings, and the occasional “quick question” (that’s hardly ever quick), staying in the zone feels like meditating in the middle of a rock concert.
Beyond some of the most common culprits named above, a key reason why developers struggle to reach flow is multitasking. Some studies suggest that task-switching — i.e. starting one task and moving to another before the first one’s finished — and other self-inflicted interruptions can be even more detrimental to developer productivity than external annoyances. And simply unworkable in terms of any definition of “flow”.
On a micro level, the above phenomenon has “unhelpful management style” written all over it, with certain approaches inhibiting their development team’s productivity and flow. From fuzzy goals, unclear expectations, poor planning, and unmanageable workloads, entering the state is a pipe dream under traditional project management.
On the other hand, Agile’s structured yet flexible approach helps address many of these blockers. By breaking work into sprints and embracing asynchronous tasks, Agile creates a steady, predictable rhythm that keeps developers focused and minimises interruptions. No more constant task-switching or firefighting. Plus, with clear sprint planning and quick daily check-ins, your team stays aligned and on track, eliminating the guesswork and ensuring everyone knows exactly what to prioritise.
The power of Agile in helping development teams achieve flow is well-documented. Studies, including an article in Software, show that Agile environments lead to higher developer productivity and satisfaction. By promoting clear goals, autonomy, and regular feedback – essential ingredients for reaching flow – Agile creates a work environment where developers can truly thrive and deliver their best work.
7. Adopt a holistic approach to metrics
The difficulty of measuring the productivity of development teams has long baffled anyone with a stake in the game. The main issue with surface-level metrics and traditional indications like hours worked, lines of code written, or keystrokes tracked, is that they simply miss the mark. Writing software is a deeply creative process, in which case over-relying on such metrics can actually sabotage productivity. Instead of focusing on meaningful outcomes, developers end up “performing to the metric”, prioritising activity over impact – exactly the opposite of what drives real value for your business.
To accurately measure the productivity of development teams, it’s crucial to look beyond individual outputs and embrace holistic, team-level metrics. Take lead time for changes, for instance — the time it takes for committed code to reach production. This metric offers a far clearer view of how efficiently your team delivers value. Similarly, cycle time, which tracks the average time between a ticket’s start and completion, sheds light on the team’s effectiveness in handling tasks and identifying potential workflow bottlenecks.
Widely used frameworks such as SPACE and DORA are a good starting point for adopting a healthy approach to productivity measurement. Providing a multi-dimensional view of productivity, they assess factors such as collaboration, satisfaction, and code quality, helping organisations understand productivity in terms of team impact, not just individual effort.
By focusing on such metrics, teams are encouraged to work cohesively and prioritise quality over sheer output. After all, effective productivity metrics should capture not how much work is done, but to what extent it actually contributes to overall goals.
Improving the productivity of your development team: wrapping it up
Boosting developer productivity isn’t just about adding more productivity tools or cutting down hours — it’s about creating a work environment where developers can thrive. By focusing on upskilling, reducing unnecessary distractions, setting clear goals, and embracing Agile practices, you can empower your team to do their best work. And with the right metrics in place, you’ll be able to track meaningful progress that aligns directly with your business goals.
If you want to know more about building a software development team in India so you can boost your development productivity, you can download our ebook, which describes in detail what building an efficient offshore team is all about, the process, what to expect, and other invaluable information. In essence, it’s an ‘offshore 101’ that goes into the nuts and bolts of going that route, with some helpful tips on how to choose the right partner.
