How to scale faster by increasing your ‘developer coefficient’

Photo credit: Kobu Agency

We’re a full quarter-century into the era of modern consumer internet, and many businesses are still grappling with the fundamental problem of “digital transformation.” One reason this challenge is so pernicious is that it can’t be solved the way most transitions can—with money and management consultants.

Instead, it requires the expertise of a new breed of corporate leaders: software developers.

Developers are your most precious resource

As the global economy increasingly runs on technology-enabled rails, every company becomes a tech company, and demand for high-quality software engineers is at an all-time high.

A recent study we did with Nielsen found that 41 percent of senior executives in Singapore say that one of their companies’ greatest internal challenges is the lack of qualified software engineers. Perhaps more surprisingly, this was ranked above capital constraints—a decade after the global financial crisis.

And yet, developer talents are all too often squandered. Collectively, companies in Singapore alone are losing upwards of S$1.6 billion (~US$1.2 billion) a year paying down “technical debt,” as developers pour time into maintaining legacy systems or dealing with the ramifications of bad code.

This is especially worrisome given software developers’ outsized impact on a company’s success. Their skill set makes them a uniquely deep source of innovation, productivity, and new economic connections. When deployed correctly, developers can be economic multipliers—coefficients that dramatically ratchet up the output of their teams and companies.

How to better leverage developers

If developers are your company’s most constraining resource, the key question is how to increase their productivity?

Here are three things to consider to help increase the multiplying impact that developers can have for your company.

Understand your current costs and opportunity costs

Ninety-eight percent of business leaders in Singapore said that increasing the productivity of developers is a priority. They recognize that their organizations would be much better served by enabling developers to focus on projects which drive competitive differentiation and bring products and services to market faster.

However, our study shows that the average developer in Singapore spends around 16 hours of their 40-hour working week—nearly half of their time—on things like maintenance and dealing with bad code, errors, and debugging. Thus, developers in Singapore report that their productivity level is currently only about 66 percent.

So, consider the allocation of your developers’ time just as carefully as you would consider the allocation of dollars (if not more so).

Outsource

Some companies are already doing this