But what does that look like in practice? As we enter 2025, here are some guiding principles to help engineering teams foster sustainable growth and deliver meaningful impact.
1. Start with Ownership and Radical Clarity
Excellence begins with understanding. When teams know exactly what they own, how their work contributes to broader goals, and what success looks like, they can operate with focus and confidence.
Cortex empowers teams with easy, automated entity ownership discovery and tracking. Our portal is built to provide radical clarity into service ownership, eliminating the chaos of ambiguity. Engineers have the ability to see who owns what, what the success metrics are, and how each service ties back to broader organizational goals.
Key question: Does everyone on your team know what they’re responsible for and why it matters?
2. Make Excellence a Team Sport
Engineering excellence isn’t an individual pursuit; it’s the result of collaboration. Convert silos into centers of excellence by fostering shared accountability and cross-functional alignment. Encourage knowledge-sharing rituals, like code walkthroughs or post-mortems, that empower everyone to learn from successes and setbacks.
Cortex integrates with your workflows, uniting teams across functions by providing a centralized portal where cross-team collaboration is seamless. With Cortex, engineers, security experts, and other stakeholders can align on shared outcomes and easily collaborate—ensuring everyone is on the same page.
Key question: How can your team better align on outcomes, not just outputs?
3. Invest in Psychological Safety
Friction in engineering organizations often occurs when there is misalignment between people, not platforms or servers. When feedback, whether positive or negative, needs to be shared interpersonally, there are complex psychological variables that impact the success of those interactions.
Let’s say a DevSecOps engineer discovers that a code security metric, like code coverage, needs to be improved for a particular service. A conversation between that service’s owner and a security engineer can become fuzzy, or even toxic to the business. Will the security engineer have the authority to change that developer’s work priorities? Will the developer push back on the security engineer, perhaps making a case for an “inexploitable” vulnerability or cite other reasons not to address the issue? This can lead to gridlock and stagnation.
Alternatively, when an org-wide, highly visible central system of record like Cortex is delivering that feedback to an engineer, based on agreed-upon and widely accepted standards, then there’s no room for friction, and compliance can be maintained in a self-service, psychologically safe manner.
Key question: Are we creating an environment where engineers understand their priorities without difficult conversations?
4. Pursue Iteration, Not Perfection
In engineering, the quest for “perfect” can stifle progress. Instead, focus on rapid iteration and fast feedback loops. Excellence emerges when teams are empowered to react quickly and adapt based on real-world outcomes.
Cortex helps teams achieve this by offering real-time insights into ownership and service performance. With continuous monitoring and automated alerts, teams can iterate quickly, resolving issues as they arise and continuously improving their systems without delay.
Key question: Are we prioritizing reaction time and iteration over rigid perfection?
5. Reframe Automation as Empowerment
Automation isn’t just a tool for efficiency—it’s a way to unlock creativity. When teams automate repetitive tasks, they free up cognitive load to focus on solving complex problems and exploring new opportunities.
Cortex automates the most tedious and error-prone aspects of engineering operations—from tracking ownership to providing paved paths to production. This means your engineers can focus on high-impact work, driving innovation rather than getting bogged down by repetitive tasks.
Key question: What’s one repetitive task we could automate this quarter to free up time for innovation?
6. Define Excellence in Your Context
Excellence doesn’t look the same for every organization—or even every team. It’s essential to align on what it means for you. Is it throughput and flow? Reliability? Developer satisfaction? Define the metrics that matter most and let them guide your strategy.
Cortex helps you define and track excellence in your unique context by giving you the tools to measure and improve what matters most to your organization. Whether it’s uptime, performance, or developer productivity, Cortex enables you to define your metrics and monitor progress in real-time.
Key question: What does ‘excellence’ mean for our team, and how will we know when we’ve achieved it?
The Year of Engineering Excellence
As we step into 2025, engineering excellence will be defined by clarity, collaboration, and continuous improvement. Platforms designed to streamline ownership, automate workflows, and centralize insights are no longer optional—they’re essential.
The best teams will be those who adopt tools that align with their unique goals and enable them to execute with confidence. Here’s to a year of engineering excellence—where teams are empowered to do their best work, every day.
