How to avoid working in silos 

Estimated reading time: 15 minutes

As a business grows, it can be difficult to get a handle on siloed behavior. Changing the culture of working starts and ends with communication. 

I’ve worked at several high-growth tech companies over the course of my career, collaborating closely with data scientists and engineering teams at education and travel scale-ups, fintech companies, and more.

The industries might be different, but elements of working within engineering and data science remain the same – like the dangers of working in isolated bubbles, also known as silos.

This is a trap most engineering teams have to try and avoid falling into.

What’s wrong with silos?

Working in isolation can prevent engineering teams from understanding their work’s commercial impact or value. This can harm morale alongside objectives and key results (OKRs) if engineers feel like their work disappears into a void and doesn’t impact the company’s success.

The fallout? A rift in company culture that impacts collaborative projects and ultimately slows the business down.

To help prevent silos, there are a few things managers can do.

1. Get internal feedback early and often

Engineering at a scale-up is tough. Engineers often have to iterate quickly within projects, ship frequently, and overcome the ambiguity that comes with a highly innovative environment.

Among the chaos of a fast-moving environment, engineers need to find time for feedback from internal and external users. While feedback keeps engineers on the right track, it also helps to eliminate silos. 

Managers can help engineers ask for feedback from other teams by setting up focus groups, user interviews, regular demos, and requirements alignment calls.

This collaborative nature not only ensures a great dynamic between engineering and other teams in the business but also provides a much wider level of context for the information entering engineering’s research and discussion. 

This results in a greater appreciation for the bigger picture, an understanding of competing priorities across other teams, and ultimately helps engineers get the right information to align with company strategy.

2. Help teams feel more connected to business growth

At my company, the engineering team forms a sizeable chunk of our headcount. The main purpose of engineering is to support our customers’ user journeys and ensure they’re getting the best out of the platform.

This means that the team is very closely connected to the commercial success of the business. Engineering managers should ensure that their teams understand this connection and highlight the close link between customer impact and engineering efforts.  They should also publicly celebrate successes and learnings as regularly as possible.

Our company has a #sales channel in our comms platform, Slack. This is where engineers can keep up to date on new deals, customer feedback, and so on. It also allows them to see when a customer has subscribed to a specific feature, making room to highlight and celebrate the engineers involved in developing it.  

This sort of visibility is important, as it creates a sense of teamwork and accountability. Engineers can look at the end product and think, “Yes, I did that, with my team. We made it happen.”

3. Share the engineering story 

We recently completed a project which involved working with our legal team. We noticed it was taking many hours for legal analysts to sift through lengthy bonds or loan documents.

Engineering worked with the analysts to cut that time by half, implementing a new tooling system that sped up the review process. Having saved up to three hours in review, legal could get key information out to clients faster. This project highlights the importance of engineering as a partner to other teams, not just customers.

To share our success in this project, we took to Slack, which offers a great opportunity to share experiences like: 

• Ongoing projects.
• Current priorities and problems they are working on.
• New internal tooling they have built to improve developer experience.
• Dashboards that highlight engineering metrics.
• Impactful product improvements that may fly under the radar – for example, load time between clicking on a button to receiving the information.

We also emphasized the value of this teamwork again in our company-wide meeting.

4. Look at the smallest unit of accountability

One of our values is “family and health come first” – and it’s a value we take incredibly seriously. It gives us the liberty to not think about work outside of working hours – if someone is going on holiday, they can shut their laptop, leave it at home, and pick up where they left off when they return.

The challenge here is accountability; when the team is growing so quickly, how do you ensure that teams push on with important projects when colleagues are away?

A system I’ve implemented to help with this centers around the smallest unit of accountability being a whole team. Engineers can work independently on projects, but once they pass the final stages of quality checks, reviews, and deployment, the team takes responsibility for the final outcome. 

This prevents silos on high-priority work where there may be inescapable dependencies. Making teams the smallest unit of accountability is more commonly useful for optimizing feedback cycle time. 

We try to minimize work efforts that don’t match user needs or that aren’t the most potent method of solving a client’s problem.  

How to ensure team accountability

Setting a cultural precedent of team accountability is invaluable, but requires shared knowledge of the tech being used and working patterns across the team. 

To help make this information readily available, exercise presentations, documentation, and shared reviews. This will create a more consistent momentum of creativity as projects move through different stages to completion.

Making the work a team effort through pair programming or team days also has a huge cultural impact – it allows engineers to collaborate with and learn from each other, which builds up a stronger sense of camaraderie.

Overall, this approach means that delivery is much more stable, and people can enjoy their time off without the worry of projects being left on hold.

Communication is central to eliminating silos 

Silos may be a complex challenge to overcome, but the solution is quite simple – overcommunicate. Most, if not all, methods used to overcome siloed behavior focus on improving communication channels. 

The trick as an engineering manager is doing it in a way that brings departments together, supports the team, and helps reports understand the role they play as the business continues to grow.  

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