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So, how did you improve your company? By that I mean: processes, tech stack, optimization, etc.
The book is: High Output Management by Andrew Grove.
It is a dated book but many of the procedures described are still valid today (obviously using real digital tools).
I highly recommend you to read it. Improving a company often means improving the way people in the company work and interact while also increasing the quality of life of these people.
I think many of the practices described in this book are about these very things.
Good luck improving your business and sorry for my English (I'm Italian).
For example there are dashboards to track the progress of certain tech debt we are resolving, like replacing icons (oh god that looks horrible on mobile [0]). On the process side of things, we have a lot of people reviewing code and I built this dashboard where you can see the availability of reviewers and how much reviews they have done in the past days. This might help distribute load and also allow reviewers to see when they are doing too much [1].
When we were hiring more last year, we actively looked into improving our hiring experience. That was a group effort, but Training other folks to do technical interviews was very insightful and contributed back to our process.
Tech stack wise there are a few skeletons in the closet. Generally once you start digging, you find a lot of weird things. We work together to define metrics in order to assert which improvements have the highest impact. Always important to go in the right direction, little steps, and verify that you are going in the right direction. For example we focused on decreasing our JavaScript that is loading on every page, until we realized CSS cruft was blocking Rendering more than the JavaScript. Then we switched focus to that. Now after we identified what to fix, we focus on the JS again.
[0]: https://leipert-projects.gitlab.io/is-gitlab-pretty-yet/icon...
[1]: https://leipert-projects.gitlab.io/maintainer-workload/
A not so long time ago, I convinced developers to use the automated QA system as part of their development process. The QA folks had automated almost everything, so it was much faster to test by submitting a QA job. Moreover, QA owned the metrics around performance goals, so developing to the test meant fewer surprises.
It's been very helpful for our client-facing folks who have to copy a lot of user data.
Another example is really basic automation. You probably have people/teams around you that are not developers. They probably are spending time doing really basic repetitive tasks. One team I work with regularly would take a spreadsheet, then for each row create a folder and docs in Google Drive. I wrote them a Google Apps script that could do the task with a click. Not quite as impactful as the checklists, but each script like that saves someone a couple days a year.
- Organized a professional development group to promote book clubs, meetups, etc within the company
- Helped marketing/sales folks update web pages to fix errors or "generic business language"
- Encourage and lead efforts to use off-the-shelf tools instead of homegrown internal tools
- Took meeting notes for all-hands meetings and published them internally
- Build relationships with non-technical staff so that you can later give them feedback about processes they control
These are some things I've done over 10 years at my company, so it's a long process!