From Experiment to Impact: Why Engineering Leaders Should Treat Process Improvements Like Product Releases

Most organizations are great at communicating product releases—but rarely do the same for process improvements that enable those releases. This is a missed opportunity for any leader wanting to expand “growth mindset,” as curiosity and innovation is as critical for process improvement as it is product development.

Curiosity and innovation aren’t limited to product development. They’re just as essential in how your teams deliver that product. When engineering and delivery leaders share what they’re doing to find efficiencies and unclog bottlenecks, they not only improve Time to Value — they help their peers level up too.

Create Buzz Around Process Wins

Below is a template leaders can use via email or communication app (Slack, Microsoft Teams) to share process changes with their team. I’ve personally seen updates like this generate the same level of energy as product announcements—complete with clap emojis👏 and follow-up pings like “Tell me more!” Even better, they’re useful for performance reviews and make great resume material for the leads who author them (excluding any sensitive or proprietary content, of course).

Subject: [Experiment update] 
[Date]
Experiment Lead: [Name]

Goal: [Enter the longer term goal your experiment was in service of]

Opportunity: [Describe a bottleneck or opportunity you identified for some focused improvement]

Problem: [Describe the specific problem you aimed to solve]

Solution: [Describe the very specific solution you tested]

Metric(s): [What was the one metric you determined would help you know if your solution solved the problem? Were there any additional metrics you kept track of, to understand how they changed as well?]

Action: [Describe, in brief, what you did to get the result]

Result: [What was the result of the experiment, in terms of the above metrics?]

Next Step: [What will you do now? Will you run another experiment like this, design a new one, or will you rollout the solution more broadly?]

Key Learnings: [What did you learn during this experiment that is going to make your next action stronger?]

Please reach out to [experiment lead’s name] for more detail.

Sample Use Case

Subject: PR Descriptions Boost Review Speed by 30%

March 31, 2025
Experiment Lead: Mary O’Clary

Goal: We must pull a major capability from Q4 2024 into Q2 2025 to increase our revenue. We believe we can do this by improving productivity by 30%.

Opportunity: We found lack of clear descriptions were a primary cause of churn & delay during the review cycle. How might we improve PR descriptions, with information reviewers need?

Problem: Help PR Reviewers more regularly understand the scope of PRs, so they don’t need to ask developers a bunch of questions.

Solution: Issue simple guidelines for what we are looking for PR descriptions

Metric(s): PR Review Speed. We also monitored overall PR Cycle Time, assuming it would also improve for PRs closed within our experiment timeframe.

Action: We ran this experiment over one 2 week sprint, with no substantial changes in complexity of work or composition of the team. We kept the timeframe tight to help eliminate additional variables.

Result: We saw PR Review Speed increase by 30%

Next Step: Because of such a great result and low perceived risk, we will roll this out across Engineering and continue to monitor both PR Review Speed & PR Cycle Time.

Key Learnings: Clear, consistent PR descriptions reduce reviewer friction without adding developer overhead, giving us confidence to expand this practice org-wide to help accelerate key Q2 2025 delivery.

Please reach out to Mary for more detail.

How Make This Process Stick

My recommendation is to appoint one “editor in chief” to issue these updates each week. They should CC the experiment lead on the communication to provide visibility. In the first 4-6 weeks, this editor may need to actively solicit reports and coach people on what to share. This is normal—you’re building a new behavior. During that time, it's critical that managers respond to these updates with kudos and support, and they may need to be prompted to do so in the first couple of weeks.

If these updates become a regular ritual, within ~3 months, you’ll likely have more contributions than you can keep up with. That’s when the real cultural shift happens: people start sharing without prompting, and process improvement becomes part of how your org operates.

I’ve seen this work in large-scale organizations, from manufacturing to healthcare. Whether your continuous improvement culture is just getting started or already mature, this small practice can help you sustain momentum and deepen your culture of learning.

Give it a shot, and don’t forget to celebrate the wins along the way.

Jen Handler is the Head of Professional Services at Code Climate. She’s an experienced technology leader with 20 years of building teams that deliver outcome-driven products for Fortune 50 companies across industries including healthcare, hospitality, retail, and finance. Her specialties include goal development, lean experimentation, and behavior change.