How to Find Your Engineering Team's 'Swing'

What's the formula for a team's impact? After years of building products, I've found it boils down to two critical questions:

1. Are we pointed in the right direction? (Effectiveness)
2. Are we making meaningful progress? (Efficiency)

Think of it as a graph. On one axis, you have Effectiveness—doing work that actually delivers value. On the other, you have Efficiency—the speed and smoothness of your execution.

You can be incredibly efficient at rowing a boat in the wrong direction, which only gets you to the wrong destination faster. Or you can be pointed at the right finish line but unable to row. True, game-changing impact only happens when you combine both: a clear direction and the momentum to get there.

Think about the team you are on right now. How do you pick what you will work on? Regardless of your thoughts on if it is the “right” thing to work on, how efficiently can your team accomplish those things or “get it done”? What things are holding you back?

In the book “The Boys in the Boat” by Daniel James Brown, he talks about ‘swing’:

"There is a thing that sometimes happens in rowing that is hard to achieve and hard to define... It's called 'swing.' It only happens when all eight oarsmen are rowing in such perfect unison that no single action by any one is out of sync with those of all the others... Rowing then becomes a kind of perfect language. Poetry, that's what a good swing feels like".

Have you ever felt anything close to that in how you deliver value on your team? Is something like that even a worthy goal in engineering?

Part 1: The "What" — Pointing the Boat in the Right Direction

If you aren’t pointed in the right direction, you aren’t going to be winning any rowing competitions. In fact, you’ll probably just end up crashing your boat. So let’s start by ensuring we are working toward the right goals. The principles an individual engineer cares about might not be what their company cares about. How does one reconcile a desire a software engineer has for quality or maintainability with a product manager’s desire to ship as many features as humanly possible within the next quarter?

This is the fundamental challenge of alignment. In a crew shell, the coxswain is responsible for steering the boat and setting the pace, ensuring every rower is aligned on the course. In an engineering team, that role is often less clear or split across a few roles. Ensuring there is the correct balance of priorities within a team and organization is a hard challenge to solve for any company.

The tension between quality and feature velocity often comes from a misalignment on the true destination or maybe the true time horizon. Is that time horizon a single sprint? A quarter? Your whole career? In rowing the coxswain sets the pace. If they push the pace too early then the rowers will tire and be overtaken. A craftsman knows that a well-maintained boat—clean code, solid architecture, robust tests—will be faster and more reliable over the course of a long race. A product manager is often under immense pressure to show progress now. The conflict dissolves when both parties agree that the goal isn't just to row fast, but to win. This means building something that is not only fast today but sustainable for the future.

True alignment isn't about a prioritized list of tasks being handed down. It's about a shared understanding of the destination and a shared belief in the course. It’s about focusing on outcomes over outputs. The goal isn’t to complete 10 features; it’s to increase user retention by 5%. When a team is deeply aligned on the outcome, debates about craftsmanship vs. speed become collaborative discussions about the best way to win.

But having the right destination is only half the battle. You can be pointed directly at the finish line and still lose if the boat is chaotic and inefficient. Direction sets the course, but it doesn't create "swing."

Part 2: The "How" — Finding Your Team's Swing

"Swing" is that magical, elusive state of peak performance. It’s not about brute force or working longer hours—in fact, it’s the opposite. It’s a feeling of effortless power, where the work just flows. It's poetry. So, what does the pursuit of "swing" look like on an engineering team? It starts by identifying what breaks it.

Things that kill swing:

• Constant Context Switching: Imagine one rower suddenly deciding to paddle backward. The entire boat lurches. That's what happens when an engineer has to constantly jump between multiple projects, bug fixes, and urgent requests. Rhythm is destroyed.
• Individual Heroics: A boat's speed is determined by the synchronized effort of the team, not the strength of its single strongest rower. When one person codes far ahead, creating integration nightmares, or becomes a bottleneck for reviews, the unison is broken.
• Drag: Technical debt, slow build times, manual deployment processes, and long waits for feedback are all forms of drag. They are the barnacles on the hull of the boat, making every single stroke harder than it needs to be.

Finding your team’s swing is about relentlessly eliminating that friction.

Ways to cultivate swing:

• Limit Work in Progress (WIP): This is the single most effective way to create unison. By focusing the entire team's effort on a small number of tasks, you ensure work moves smoothly from "in progress" to "done." Everyone is pulling on the same oar at the same time, moving one piece of value across the finish line before starting the next.
• Shorten Feedback Loops: In rowing, the coxswain provides immediate feedback. In engineering, this means fast code reviews, a robust CI/CD pipeline, and getting your work in front of users as quickly as possible. Quick feedback allows for real-time course correction, preventing the team from rowing in the wrong direction for too long.
• Cultivate Trust: The rowers in the book had absolute trust in each other. They knew the person in front of them would take their stroke on time, every time. Engineering teams need this level of psychological safety—the trust to point out problems, to experiment and fail, and to rely on one another without fear or blame. This trust is the "perfect language" of a high-performing team.

A Worthy Goal

So, is "swing" a worthy goal in engineering? Absolutely.

It’s not some abstract, unattainable ideal. It's the tangible result of a team that is deeply aligned on its goals and ruthlessly dedicated to improving its process. It's a state where work feels less like a frantic struggle and more like a powerful, rhythmic glide. It's sustainable, effective, and deeply rewarding.

You don't achieve it by adopting a specific framework. You find it by asking simple questions every day: What is slowing our boat down? And how can we, together, make the next stroke just a little bit smoother than the last? When your team finds their swing you can feel it and that’s something worth striving for.