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Herron Todd White
Culture: The Foundation of Great Engineering Teams
Arun Thenabadu
Arun Thenabadu is Head of Engineering & Architecture at Herron Todd White, where he leads engineering teams focused on quality, scalability and sustainable delivery. An experienced technology leader, he specializes in building strong engineering cultures that reduce technical debt, improve decision-making and enable teams to deliver high-quality outcomes consistently.
From a work perspective, the term culture could be defined as a set of values and behaviours that team members adopt in how they go about their work. In an engineering function, culture holds a high bar for technical quality, not through policing or bureaucracy, but through pride in the craft and a shared understanding of why quality matters. It is a list of unwritten rules that the team practices in their ways of working and in how team members treat each other while they work.
Culture does not emerge by accident; it has to be intentionally designed, nurtured and modelled by leadership. The right culture is what takes an engineering function from average to good to great. No matter how large or small your team is, as a leader, you cannot be across every minute detail of work, and it’s often in those tiny gaps where a minuscule detail gets missed and becomes tech debt. The challenge with tech debt is that it compounds; small shortcuts become larger problems, and over time they slow delivery, increase complexity and erode quality. This is why culture matters; it is what guides teams and individuals to make good decisions when no one is watching.
I often compare a lost sale to tech debt to show how vastly more damaging the latter is. Whilst the loss of a sale is impactful, the damage stops there. In the case of tech debt, the damage continues to grow as more work is released on top of it, and this is where the compounding really starts. This is why having the right culture matters so much: when the culture is strong, individual team members govern themselves by those shared values and behaviours, significantly reducing the likelihood of anti-patterns and bad code making its way to production.
When I join a new engineering team, one of the first topics I introduce is a shared understanding of what “good looks like.” I use this phrase to cement a collective agreement on the standards we want to uphold as a team. I apply it broadly, in how we engage in robust technical discussions where everyone is respected and encouraged to share their point of view. The ability to agree to disagree but commit to the chosen path forward, the architectural guidelines we adopt and abide by, how we introduce new design patterns and frameworks, and right down to the smallest detail of how we code for maintainability.
Culture does not emerge by accident; it must be designed, nurtured and modelled by leadership to move a function from average to good to great.
Deeply embedded in this approach is the right to question why we are doing what we are about to start. Being outcome-focused means it’s not just about the feature itself, but about making a conscious decision to proceed in a certain way rather than taking the path of convenience. It also includes having the confidence to challenge low-value work and learning to say NO.
Once an engineering culture starts getting practised, the ways of working become a given. They are naturally taken into account in everything the team does; from how they approach implementing something new, be it a product, a feature, or a new pattern, framework or tech tool, to how they estimate and size work, how they assess their peers and even how they interview and recruit.
Embedding a culture is not simple nor easy. It takes investment in time, repetitive messaging, leading by example and shout-outs that highlight team members who are truly living the culture.
Once the team starts believing that living this culture makes us both individually and collectively better, while also benefiting the organisation through modern and current practices and technology, the culture becomes self-cultivating and sustaining, truly placing your team on the path to becoming a great engineering practice.
