Organizational Ohm's Law—Case in Point: Engineering Velocity

Abstract

Organizational productivity determines how fast an organization can utilize its resources to achieve desired outcomes. The ability to deliver is one of the most critical competitive advantages for any organization. Despite the well-proven empirical evidence and best practices to improve organizational productivity, it is still hard to comprehend the problem holistically because there are so many interdependent moving parts. In this article, we propose the concept of organizational Ohm's law inspired by Ohm's law in electrical engineering. Organizational Ohm's law is built upon well-proven empirical evidence. Organizational Ohm's law is a general descriptive model to comprehensively understand organizational productivity. We state that organizational velocity is proportional to outcome-output efficiency and organizational potential, and inversely proportional to organizational resistance. We then apply the model to understand engineering velocity, exploring factors that contribute to the parameters of organizational Ohm's law, and introducing an equivalent circuit approach to decompose organizational resistance. We show that the model is intuitive and effective when considering various engineering productivity situations. Furthermore, we share our stories of improving engineering velocity by transforming from a single product to a product platform, and by migrating from a monolith to microservices and macroservices. We also explain how to utilize organizational Ohm's law in practice using real-life examples from different companies. In the end, we give suggestions on how to use organizational Ohm's law as a both retrospective and predictive tool.