If you want to create a great team culture, promoting transparency is a good place to start. The best product development teams are completely transparent on goals, key decisions, and performance. When every team member knows what they’re working towards, why they’re doing it, and how their work is performing, it builds trust and accountability in software engineering practices.
Transparency aligns everyone’s interests and helps catch issues early by airing concerns before they become big problems. Without it, team culture can break down – in the absence of information, people often jump to negative conclusions, mistrust spreads, and small issues balloon into big problems.
Transparency promotes an environment of trust and accountability that teams thrive in. It aligns interests and avoids problems by airing issues before they become significant. Without transparency, team culture breaks down. In the absence of information people often jump to negative conclusions.
When information is openly shared, team members can make better decisions faster, and everyone feels a collective responsibility for outcomes.
If transparency is so obviously beneficial, why do many teams struggle with it? The truth is, being transparent is hard. It’s human nature to be a bit protective – opening up our work and decisions invites scrutiny and potential criticism. Admitting problems or sharing half-finished ideas makes us feel vulnerable.
Mistrust spreads and small issues balloon into big problems. This is all pretty obvious, so why is it still such a problem? Well, the challenge is that transparency is difficult to promote and maintain.
It's human nature to want to be less transparent. Being transparent is hard.
Transparency demands that people open themselves up to external feedback. By being transparent they are openly sharing what they are doing and why they're doing it. The result is that other people may criticise what they see. Hiding work and reasons for taking certain decision lets people, temporarily, avoid confrontation. It's human nature to want to be less transparent. Being transparent is hard.
Differences in domain expertise and ways of working mean silos quickly form. These silos are big barriers to the spread of information in a team.
Maintaining transparency is particularly challenging on software development teams. These teams usually contain people with a variety of different roles and skill. Engineers, product managers and designers etc, often use different process and sets of tools. These differences in the way of working and in domain expertise mean silos quickly form.
These silos are big barriers to the spread of information within a team.A common scenario is product definition happening in isolation from the rest of a team. Decisions are made behind closed doors and then passed on without clear rationale.
Another example is the lack of visibility into the software development phase of projects. Developers coding in isolation and sharing work only when it's done. At which point any design issues are already baked-in and refactoring is expensive. A lack of transparency around work and accountability leads to mistrust.These examples are all too familiar to anyone who has worked in a product development team. There are, however, some simple actions you can take to promote openness.
Building a transparent, accountable team culture takes conscious effort. Here are some concrete actions and best practices to increase team transparency and foster accountability in your software development team:
Encourage people to share their work early and often. Don’t wait until something is “100% perfect” to reveal it – by then it may be too late to get useful feedback or course-correct. Have people present their own work to team members in weekly team meetings. Presenting and sharing product specifications, designs, and coded features before they're done. Encourage people presenting to provide rationale for their decisions and prompt others for feedback.
This practice keeps everyone in the loop and allows for timely adjustments rather than late surprises. Open demos and presentations also reinforce accountability – when each person regularly demonstrates their contributions, it’s clear to all who is doing what and how it connects to the team’s goals.
Make it impossible for people to work for weeks in isolation and only show their final results. Create shared open repositories, where team members can access each others' work, while it's in progress. Make everyone's work as visible as possible.
Utilize an open task board or issue tracker that shows all user stories, tasks, and their status. This way, anyone can log in and immediately see who is working on what, what’s completed, and where help might be needed
For instance, use a common project wiki or document hub for specifications and decisions, rather than private files. Store code in a single source-control repository that everyone on the team can browse.
It should be dead easy to find the latest versions of any design or specification. Particularly while it is still being worked on. Likewise, invest in continuous deployment or builds, so that the latest version of any code is always available.
Make it impossible for people to work for weeks in isolation and only show their final results.
Encourage an inclusive design and development process. Break the silos by involving everyone in the process from the start. This means developers, designers, product managers, QA, and others collaborate early and continuously, rather than handing off work at gated stages. It's important that this happens as early on as possible in the process.
Before decisions are locked-in and feedback is difficult to incorporate. Likewise, encourage collaborative problem solving during development. That is, people collaborating closely from inception to deployment of a product. Not handing over work in waterfall-like steps and then forgetting about it.
Promote an environment where people feel comfortable requesting, sharing and accepting feedback. This means ensuring that feedback is always provided in a constructive manner. That people are open to suggestions and new ideas, as well as respectful to those providing them. People who feel comfortable and respected are far more likely to act in a transparent manner. Senior team members need to lead by example and there should be zero tolerance for disrespectful behavior.
Senior team members need to lead by example and there should be zero tolerance for disrespectful behavior.
A good practice is to hold blameless retrospectives after each sprint or project: the team discusses what went well and what didn’t, focusing on processes and improvements rather than assigning blame to individuals.
This sends the message that the purpose of discussing problems is to learn and get better, not to shame anyone.
Similarly, if a developer is struggling with a task, they should feel safe to ask for help early rather than hide the issue – and teammates should respond supportively.
Transparency has to start at the top. When managers and leaders are open about their decisions and reasoning, it sets the tone for an open team. This means clearly communicating things like project priorities, changes in direction, or company policies and the “why” behind them.
Ensuring that managers are transparent about the decisions they take is critical. From strategic decisions through to goals, promotions, hiring and firing. Being open and over-communicating on any decisions that impact a team.
Transparent managers set the tone for an open and trusting team. Regular all-team Q&As are one way to promote openness around management decisions.Product development teams that promote transparency are far more likely to succeed.
When people see their managers communicate transparently and also acknowledge uncertainties or lessons learned, it humanizes leadership and strengthens the team’s confidence that they’re all in it together.
Creating a culture of transparency is challenging, particularly for multi-skilled teams. The key to doing so, is to take a proactive approach to creating an open environment and leading by example.
