Why Engineering Culture Matters
Exploring how team culture shapes delivery speed, quality, and long-term success.
Mon Aug 25 2025
Engineering culture is often talked about, but not always well understood. It's not just about getting the right "vibes" - it's a lot more than that. At its core, it’s the set of shared values, practices, and habits that guide how a team builds and ship software into your customer's hands.
As an example, teams who have a good culture of quality (through automating their tests) see <15% of their deployments requiring rollbacks or hotfixes. Teams who don't practice this typically hover around the 40 to 60% mark!
| Performance Tier | Typical CFR (Change Failure Rate) | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Elite / High-Performing Teams | ~ 0-15% of deployments causing failures (rollback, hotfixes, degraded service) | Opsera citing DORA, “Change failure rate for elite and high-performing typically falls between 0% and 15%.” (Opsera) |
| Average / Medium Performers | ~ 16-30% | Harness SEI definitions: “High: Failure rate of 16 to 30 percent; Medium: 31-45 percent; Elite: under 15%.” (Harness) |
| Low Performers / Poor Culture | Above ~ 45% in many cases — sometimes 40-60%+ depending on industry/context | Axify via “DevOps Acceleration Report (2022)” reports “low performers between 46-60%” in some organizations for CFR. (Axify) |
Think of all that time that could be better spent working on customer value!
Speed through trust and autonomy
One of the biggest killers to building a good engineering culture is removing their autonomy.
Perhaps the team have had a period of failed deploys or bugs - it's very tempting to wade into the mix and start to try "fixing things" or worse, putting in additional processes. For example, one mistake I made was trying to get the business to colaborate better on ensuring features were understood before they went live - so I asked my project managers to run Go/No-Go meetings and have everyone sign things off. It sounded sensible on the surface - but this flew in the face of advice straight out of the dev ops handbook. Not only had I added inertia to the process by introducing more processes and handoffs, I'd reduced the autonomy of the team to solve their own problems.
We got rid of these meetings pretty soon after
When engineers are trusted to make decisions, and when teams have autonomy to own problems end to end, delivery accelerates. There’s less waiting on approvals, fewer hand-offs, and more energy spent on solving customer needs. Culture shapes whether teams feel empowered to act, or stuck waiting for permission.
Quality through discipline and craft
A team with good culture will want to do things well, as well as get things out the door quickly. These two desires are often juxtaposed against each other and often lead to trade-offs. However, there are things that highly performing do to achieve both.
I often talk about test driven development being a key skill in crafting good software. Whilst I'll admit that there is a bit of a learning curve to getting into the mindset of being comfortable with failing tests - the advantages in test coverage, living documentation for your code, and only writing what is valuable to the customer still makes this one of the most important practices a good team of software engineers will adopt.
Pairing is another valuable discipline to a team. Very often I've seen teams who "do it" (read, when they have to), but the really perfomant teams do it. Straight out of the XP (extreme programming) handbook, a team that pairs on everything is in a constant review cycle of their code. Not only is the code better, with fewer bugs, but it skips the need for wasteful code review sessions - additional hand-offs that get in the way of delivering value.
Lastly, Matillion has a brilliant company value "Customer Obsessed". This term really resonated with me at Matillion because it's what every good Software Engineer should be doing - building software that benefits the users, rather than just satisfies themselves. Teams obsessing about their customers get true value out of the door quicker, and spend less time worrying about the details.
With a culture that values craft and learning, quality isn’t an afterthought; it’s built into every line of code.
Long-term success through resilience
Engineering culture also determines how teams handle change and setbacks. Do they learn quickly from mistakes? Do they support each other through challenges? Teams with a strong culture are more resilient—they adapt faster, reduce technical debt, and sustain delivery over time without burning out.
In the early days of Partful's move to a SaaS offering, we nailed this by really tightening up how all three of our teams worked together. We always had each other's back, we encouraged each other, and we talked constantly. It made it a great place to work because we knew we were all going the same direction. Mistakes were made, but we made them together and fixed them together.
Conclusion
Technology choices matter, but it’s culture that decides whether those choices pay off. By investing in engineering culture, businesses create teams that move quickly, deliver with confidence, and build products that stand the test of time.
Want to improve your engineering culture? Get in touch.