Vitamin E for Engineering Teams: Caring for Engineering Excellence
Vitamin E is an antioxidant that protects human cells from damage caused by free radicals. It works continuously, preserving long-term health and resilience for our bodies.
Similarly, in engineering leadership, a focus on engineering excellence helps address technical debt and quality issues. Technical debt and quality issues act like oxidative stress, impacting speed and morale, and ultimately make it harder to deliver business impact.
The Functions of Vitamin E
The human body can’t produce Vitamin E and must be obtained from the diet (or supplementation if necessary). Unlike Vitamin D, which the body can produce with sunlight, Vitamin E must come from external sources.
Vitamin E is fat-soluble and is found mainly in foods that contain healthy fats, such as nuts & seeds (almonds, sunflower seeds, hazelnuts), vegetable oils (olive oil or sunflower oil), green leafy vegetables (kale, swiss chard, etc). Avocado is also another good source of Vitamin E. In case you are not able to eat enough foods rich in Vitamin E, you can use supplements.
Pro tip: Vitamin E is best absorbed when eaten with fat-containing meals, since it is fat-soluble.
Vitamin E covers multiple functions:
Protects cell membranes from damage
Neutralizes free radicals early
Works continuously and proactively
Preserves long-term function & energy
Engineering Excellence in Teams
As an engineering leader, we often have the tendency to prioritize product roadmap iteams first-and-only given our teams need to deliver lots of business impact. Often, we need to make tradeoffs, which may involve creating tech debt or introducing follow-up tasks. This is pretty common as companies tend to focus on topline business metrics. Engineering leaders need to make sure to guarantee quality is taken care of, otherwise we’ll end up slowing down our team eventually and actually have a negative impact on the business goals.
To keep tech debt under control and maintain high quality, one critical component is to uphold high standards in terms of engineering excellence for our teams. To do so, we might want to follow the following 3 steps:
Measure the health of your systems and processes
Prioritize engineering excellence along with product priorities
Embed engineering excellence as part of the team culture
1. Measure the Health of Your Systems
You can’t protect what you don’t measure. Just as physicians use blood panels to detect deficiencies long before symptoms appear, engineering leaders need regular “health checks” to understand the state of their systems. Frameworks like DORA, SPACE, or DevEx (see article) provide useful lenses, but the key is to choose a set of measures that are actionable for your team’s context.
Without going too much into the weeds on which framework or specific metrics your team needs, there are a few core areas to monitor:
Performance: How fast and responsive your system is. Examples include p90 latency, page load times, and API response times.
Scalability: How well the system holds up under growth. Examples: throughput under 10x traffic, auto-scaling efficiency, etc
Reliability: How consistently your system delivers expected results without failure. Examples: uptime %, mean time to recovery (MTTR), error rate per request, etc
Code Quality: How maintainable, readable, and correct your codebase is. Examples include static analysis scores, cyclomatic complexity, and bug density, among others.
Development Efficiency: How quickly and effectively engineers can deliver value. Examples: deployment frequency, lead time for changes, CI/CD pipeline duration, developer satisfaction surveys, etc
Testability: How easily changes can be validated to ensure safety and correctness. Examples: unit/integration test coverage, flaky test rate, etc.
Security: How well the system protects data and resists malicious attacks. Examples: # of critical vulnerabilities, results from penetration tests, etc
Observability & Monitoring: How effectively the system provides visibility into its internal state for debugging and improvement. Examples: coverage of logging, alerting accuracy (false positive/negative rates), and % of critical flows instrumented with tracing.
Cost Efficiency: How resources scale with value. Examples: infra cost per DAU/request, cloud cost allocation accuracy, etc
Security & Compliance: How well your system is in compliance with required standards. Examples: SOC2/ISO audit pass rate, % of systems with automated compliance checks, etc
These dimensions don’t need to be tracked with dozens of dashboards. A simple set of those metrics, reviewed regularly, is often enough to surface where the “oxidative stress” is creeping in. The goal is not perfection, but rather gathering signals, so engineering leaders can make deliberate decisions about where to invest in strengthening the system.
2. Prioritize Excellence Alongside Product Goals
Vitamin E isn’t optional, it’s a daily essential. Engineering excellence should be treated the same way, prioritized continuously, not deferred until “after we ship” or “when there’s time.”
Prioritization, however, is situational. Depending on the maturity of your team, the health of your systems, and the urgency of business goals, you may need to apply different approaches to ensure engineering excellence gets the space it deserves:
Dedicated Tech Debt / System Weeks: Periodically dedicate an entire sprint or week to paying down accumulated debt and strengthening foundations. These bursts are effective when the team needs to “reset the baseline.”
20% Allocation Model: Reserve ~10–20% of ongoing capacity in each sprint or week for quality and tech debt work. Similar to daily nutrient intake, this steady model should prevent issues from compounding.
Unified Approach: Bake engineering excellence directly into the product development lifecycle, rather than treating it as a separate activity. For example, when planning for a new product feature, explicitly consider test coverage, observability, and performance in your timelines. Of course, the aim is not perfection (e.g., you could ship products even if we don’t have 100% test coverage), but is to minimize accruing tech debt.
Opportunistic fixes: When working on a code path for product development, opportunistically clean up technical debt and add missing tests. This small effort could lead to meaningful improvements over time.
The gist here is: don’t let excellence be an afterthought.
3. Embed Engineering Excellence as Part of the Culture
Just as Vitamin E sustains health through daily habits, engineering excellence sustains team health when it is embedded into the team culture and not treated reactively.
A culture of excellence means that every engineer feels accountable for the long-term quality of the systems they build. It’s not the job of an occasional sprint, it’s a shared mindset. This shows up in the small decisions: writing tests without being asked, documenting so the next teammate can succeed, or raising concerns early.
Leaders reinforce this culture by:
Talking about system health with the same seriousness as product metrics.
Recognizing craftsmanship (a great refactor, observability improvements) in retros and all-hands, not just feature launches.
Framing excellence as an accelerator of delivery, not a blocker.
When excellence becomes cultural, it stops competing with speed, but actually, it enables it.
Vitamin E should protect our cells through daily consumption. In the same way, by proactively addressing tech debt, embedding high standards, and balancing speed with stability, leaders can build teams with have long-term health.