As organisations grow, there is the natural tendency to add more processes, controls and overheads, but rarely do they review if the current processes are working. Rarer still is removing processes and controls that are no longer necessary.

At ClearBank, we rigorously review our processes and controls to ensure their effectiveness. We constantly try to find the balance between autonomy and processes, preferring processes that provide enabling constraints rather than governing. This allows people to make their own decisions within their processes that help them, as opposed to getting in their way and negatively impacting the teams.

Our guiding principle as an engineering team is having positive outcomes for the bank, our clients and, ultimately, their customers.

In part 1, I examined the balance of autonomy and structured decision making. In this follow-up, I’ll take those principles and look at the related themes of driving efficiency and maintaining a great culture during a period of rapid growth and nurturing engineering talent.

The last couple of years have been tough on engineering teams. After a period of sustained growth, arguably even over hiring, the trend has reversed to where we saw round after round of layoffs at the large tech firms.

Now we have this drive to ‘do more with less’. Or rather, there’s a focus on driving efficiency and delivering value. But that is also dangerous and there is a real problem of teams being squeezed and having no space to continuously improve. It's all about shipping the next feature, the next feature, the next feature.

That approach may not seem problematic today, but I believe it will have a negative effect in three to four years’ time. We run the risk of removing the space for people to improve. To refactor a bit of code. To update documentation or put that call in about a process that feels broken, and they’d like the opportunity to create a fix.

So how do we resolve it?

There are many frameworks that teams can use to their advantage. But an often-overlooked element is how leadership behaves. If it looks like we are flat out and don't have time to do anything, then our teams are going to feel like they should be operating in the same way. So, it’s crucial to ensure we’re not perceived that way and ensure we’re encouraging that culture of continuous improvement.

Then there are things engineering leadership teams can do in terms of influencing the right stakeholders, senior people, the leadership team and the wider organisation to the value of the continuous improvement mindset.

ClearBank got to where it is today because of a continuous improvement mindset, and we’re determined to protect that. We've created space to deliver and enhance a great technology platform. Customers come to us because we never go down and we have a higher quality platform compared to our competitors.

That’s by design. We’ve taken the time to continuously improve it. Leadership has given us the space to do that, entrusting us to deliver. It also means we’ve never needed to ask for permission to do so.

However, we must also acknowledge the realities of the current macroeconomic climate and sometimes, we're going to have to make compromises on idealisms and pick our battles. We will have to ensure we're improving the parts that we absolutely think we need to versus those that are going to have less impact.

A metaphor I often use is ClearBank as a power boat, while incumbents are oil tankers and how that has given us an advantage. But some of those banks are hundreds of years old. We’ve existed for seven.

So how do we avoid becoming an oil tanker and losing our competitive advantage?

One way is setting clear boundaries and ownership, what people own and therefore can make decisions on and make changes to. We try to ensure that's clear. Interactions between those boundaries is something we continuously focus on. The more awkward interactions there are between those boundaries, the less autonomy teams can have to move quickly and make good decisions. That's certainly an area I, as a principal engineer, focus on because I have that wider picture of the organisation.

Then there’s engineering culture. Maintaining that is not simple and takes a great deal of effort. That used to come somewhat naturally when everyone was in an office. But many of us are remote as ClearBank has fully embraced and encouraged a hybrid model to enable our people to work where they are most productive.

That means we must think more strategically and concertedly about how we work and maintain a culture of continuous learning.

One thing we’ve implemented, and that other team members have since taken on, is we have our own internal meet up every Friday called Tech It Easy. Like our Architecture Advisory Forum, it’s completely open to the team, anyone can come in, anyone can talk whether that’s for 5 minutes or 15 minutes. But it doesn't need to be about tech, and it doesn’t even need to be about ClearBank specifically. It’s a safe space we’ve created that anybody can go to and spend time with their colleagues, share interesting ideas they’ve seen and discuss all kinds of things.

As mentioned, we’ve gone from a period of sustained and rapid economic growth to a more subdued economy that has impacted engineering teams across every sector. We must also consider that as more engineers have joined the workforce, the industry has teams with people who have five to eight years of experience.

These are all skilled people who also need support and nurturing to advance their careers. It really comes down to how we, collectively and individually, need to mentor. We need senior people to mentor.

I’ve always found mentoring to be a high-impact activity because if you think about it while you're supporting someone, they tend to be in another team. If you grow them, they're in a team with other people, they're likely going to be sharing their learnings with that team that they are in.

Selfishly, I've also found that mentoring has an impact on the wider organisation by upskilling that person. How they test and change software improves the entire team; it helps them ask the right questions. So, while mentoring is done on a one-to-one basis, it has a much wider impact than just the individual.

Over the course of these two articles, I’m sure many of the issues I’ve outlined are familiar to your engineering teams, particularly if, like ClearBank, you're on a strong growth trajectory.

As a final point, I'll return to the idea of safe spaces as I believe they are critical to helping people learn and develop. I’ve referenced our Architecture Advisory Forum which is open to anyone to attend and how we’ve had junior members attend and present. The fact they feel they had a safe and trusted environment to present an enterprise decision that they wanted to be part of stands out to me as evidence this approach works.

Hopefully, the ideas and examples I’ve outlined offer ideas to instil autonomy and nurture a great culture.

Michael Gray is a Principal Engineer at ClearBank. He has a passion for software and systems and particularly Domain-Driven Design, engineering culture and leadership, creating the right environment for engineering teams to thrive. Prior to ClearBank, Michael led the Technical Architecture team at Vanquis, providing context and direction to the engineering teams and implementing enhanced governance to ensure it met regulatory obligations while ensuring engineering teams were empowered.