Your engineers are probably not the problem

In ten years, most of it inside banks, I have worked with genuinely elite teams. I have almost never met one that shipped slowly because the people were slow.

What slows them is a delivery system nobody designed on purpose: four handoffs where one would do, a review waiting two days for the one person allowed to give it, a control everybody repeats and nobody can still explain. The engineers inside it usually know exactly where it hurts — they are rarely asked.

So the work starts by listening to them, measuring what they describe, and taking it out of their way.