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Trust is a key component of optimal teamwork. When team members know they can fully trust and rely on one another, work is more enjoyable, there’s greater productivity, collaboration is more efficient, and the team functions as a more cohesive unit with shared goals and alignment in how best to reach them.
Product development typically involves collaboration between several different teams/departments, often also including external providers of development services. In this context, trust is particularly important to an agile, frictionless development process which allows room for experimentation and innovation.
So, much like test-driven development ensures that development is robust, performant and secure from a technical standpoint, and that the output addresses key user needs, trust-driven development ensures that the process is focused on efficiency, productivity, alignment, and shared values/objectives, with the understanding that better collaboration leads to better business outcomes.
In this article, we’ll explore what exactly we mean by the concept of “trust-driven development”, what benefits businesses can expect from making trust a core principle, and first-hand lessons and tips on how to foster a culture of trust.
1. Trust is a two-way street
Let’s start with a cliché – one that still holds true, especially in the context of business and team collaboration – trust is a two-way street. Just as much as managers and business owners will want to construct teams composed of members that are trustworthy and reliable, these same team members will also need to trust their managers, mentors and any other team mates responsible for cultivating a healthy, trust based company culture.
Communication needs to be based on constructive feedback, with regular back and forths that don’t add friction and/or pressure to the process. This contributes to shared responsibility, accountability and success for the completed work.
2. Psychological safety
When trust forms the basis of team/company culture, this helps cultivate psychological safety on the teams. In a psychologically safe environment, communication can be more open; in the context of development, this means that junior developers and newcomers feel at ease asking questions and challenging senior developers, tech leads and others in management positions. This encourages out-of-the-box thinking, promotes proactiveness and ultimately facilitates innovation.
3. Developer experience
In order to empower developers as much as possible, developer experience should be a particularly important consideration. Some of the core approaches that we’ve had long-lasting success with at Agiledrop have been:
- Providing dedicated onboarding and mentorship programs to new developers
- Promoting team spirit with regular team activities
- Promoting collaboration, learning & knowledge sharing
These cover the culture aspect of developer experience, which also includes considerations such as hiring for culture/value fit. The other two key aspects to consider here are the technology aspect (i.e. how much freedom do developers have in non-critical tooling such as their choice of AI model or IDE) and the project aspect (i.e. what project/team a specific developer is assigned to).
4. Trust as the basis of customer & partner relationships
Business success is also hugely driven by trust, whether that’s in a B2C or a B2B context. The number one thing they have in common is the need for open and timely communication. Shared values have also become a critical factor of trust, with more and more people, especially in the younger generations, refusing to engage with brands whose values don’t align with their own.
What’s specific to B2B as opposed to B2C is the importance of references, testimonials and case studies over other marketing and branding content; they are some of the best ways to gauge a business partner’s trustworthiness before any initial conversation even takes place.
In the even more specific context of partnerships with a provider of development services, the most successful collaborations are with the firms whose developers exhibit a high degree of independence and proactiveness, while still being team players that prioritize good collaboration/cooperation.
5. Soft skills & hard skills
Next, let’s take a look at both hard and soft skills that help build trust.
Hard skills demonstrating technical efficiency:
- Understanding and following industry standards
- Proven record of practical experiences on important/complex projects (see case studies and references mentioned in section 4)
- Deep expertise in new innovative technologies that are currently in high demand
Soft/people skills:
- Adaptability and flexibility
- Ability and willingness to learn; growth mindset
- Independence & proactiveness
- Reliability & accountability
- Innovative, out-of-the-box thinking
- Horizontal thinking over being hyperfocused on a specific (vertical) problem
6. People vs. technology
Before we look at the consequences of a lack of trust and the benefits of trust-driven development, there’s a final important aspect to consider: the interplay between people and technology.
On the one hand, an investment in people (in this case, developers) is essential. We already mentioned developer experience and the emphasis that should be placed on learning.
However, with the development industry changing so much recently, this now often means helping developers find ways to make better use of their existing skill sets, and more easily learn and adopt new emerging technologies.
On the other hand, technology investments should be strategic and well informed. Adoption of new technologies should prioritize security, scalability, and a good balance between cost and efficiency.
But, regarding the interplay between people and technology, the most important consideration becomes: is this a technology people enjoy working with, or do they dread it? A new framework which prioritizes the developer experience will naturally lead to better business outcomes than one that’s a pain to work with.
Test-driven development and trust-driven development
Let’s return to our comparison from the introduction. Test-driven development and trust-driven development are more than just near-homonyms; they actually work really well in tandem. Namely, thorough testing promotes trust in the software and the process, while ensuring that optimal technology solutions are used.
This is particularly important on more complex projects with several important stakeholders beyond just the technical team.
For example, during a recent project for a government logistics organization, we significantly improved the reliability of the platform by implementing a modernized testing framework which includes over 700 comprehensive tests. This has greatly improved maintainability and reduced the amount of back and forths between different stakeholder teams working with the platform.
AI and human oversight
The next topic we need to cover here is (of course) the use of AI. AI-assisted development is becoming increasingly popular, whether it’s pure vibe coding by non-developers, or a more efficient and productive workflow of people already having development experience.
One of our development managers recently gave a talk and wrote a blog post about the double-edged sword of using AI during onboarding. In addition to the traps of overrelying on AI tools, he also presented best practices of using them in a way that promotes both productivity and growth, particularly for new developers.
Some of the essentials he highlighted are good communication between team members even with the use of AI, an understanding of common AI shortcomings, and a thorough critical evaluation of the results and solutions proposed by AI.
In the context of AI, trust is an especially important consideration. A lot of people find it inherently difficult to trust AI tools and the motives of the companies behind them due to the black box nature of these technologies.
This becomes even more pronounced with news of AI privacy scandals and/or examples of people using AI tools with ill intent.
For developers working together, this means that, while the developer experience remains an important consideration for the adoption of AI tools, some standardization needs to be done in order to ensure security and privacy, whether that’s around an enterprise license or a custom, tailored AI framework.
7. Trust vs. lack of trust
A lack of trust during development can lead to silos, opportunities falling through, missed deadlines and objectives, security and privacy implications, and unexpected expenses (with the worst case scenario here being bankruptcy, i.e. going out of business due to these expenses accumulating).
But when team members really trust one another, development is faster and more productive, leaving more room for experimentation with fewer risks, i.e. a higher ceiling without lowering the floor. This also contributes to long-term viability and scalability of the product, as well as the longevity of the team, business or strategic partnership.
On top of that, talent attraction and employee retention are both improved when trust and psychological safety are core values. This is especially true in a field such as software development, where things change rapidly and leading companies are always on the lookout for top talent.
Conclusion
Despite the advances in technology and its capabilities of quickly and effortlessly creating digital products, the success of a software product largely depends on the people involved in its creation. They need to collaborate optimally in order to ensure the successful launch of a digital product that adequately addresses both business objectives and user needs.
The more team members trust one another, the smoother the development process becomes. Such teams are much less prone to being heavily impacted by sudden market shifts or other major business upheavals.
Trust is the glue that holds teams together, which is essential for optimal development, especially in an uncertain business landscape. A company culture built around trust, psychological safety and developer experience ensures longevity and sustainability while also enabling companies to tap into the innovation happening in the field.
