It has been a while since I wrote about engineering strategy, team topologies, and tech leadership. Today, I want to share that I started a project about team cognitive load from Team Topologies.

Which is my experience with cognitive load from Team Topologies?

I have been following and learning from Team Topologies authors since they released the book in 2019. One of my key learnings was how cognitive load affects our day-to-day as developers and, consequently, how we deliver value to our customers.

In 2021, I joined Creditas as an Engineering Manager. Creditas had multiple exciting challenges, and I had the opportunity to apply several of the concepts from Team Topologies, one of them being the team cognitive load assessment.

One of my responsibilities as Engineering Manager, and later on as Head of Engineering, was engineering strategy. As you can tell, making a cohesive engineering strategy for multiple teams at different stages of maturity is challenging.

How could I impact most of the teams with less effort and investment?

Architecture, components, technologies, … all of those things are important. But if the teams cannot articulate the initiatives, you create a list of desires that won’t be accomplished.

Instead, I asked the teams which was their cognitive load with the team cognitive load assessment, and then, based on the results, acted accordingly.

By running the team cognitive load assessment, I learned two things:

1. Developers were eager to share their pains and collaborate to improve.

2. As leadership, collecting, analyzing, and keeping a history of how cognitive load evolves was tedious and manual and required training for each new leader that wanted to run the assessment.

The results of the actions based on the cognitive load were amazing. I didn’t expect an improvement in velocity, stability, autonomy, and team happiness that impactful.

But, the effort required to keep all that assessment running was too high. I would doubt that people are still running the assessments manually today.

I have two polarised experiences:

1. The decision-making when you assess the cognitive load improves.

2. Running the assessment over time is manual and time-consuming.

I want to reduce the management pain

What should you expect from this section?

I want to share with you all my journey while building this project. I will share things as:

• Technical decisions

• Software design

• Product decisions

• Domain modeling

Do you want to join the private beta when available?

Add your email to the next link, and I will contact you when it's available.

https://forms.gle/YfsVUTwNch98m5VdA

Check out the team cognitive load section

https://learnings.aleixmorgadas.dev/s/team-cognitive-load-app

You will find more posts about how the development is evolving :D