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Forbes Technology Council

Developers and engineers are the heart of every technology company. These individuals are responsible for solving an organization’s biggest product challenges and continually improving the software and systems that keep the company running.

The issue, however, is that dev teams are often too close to their work to see the bigger business picture. Developers frequently dive deep into their projects and spend a lot of time tweaking and refining. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but when other business priorities are hinging on the completion of a development sprint, it can really slow things down.

According to Forbes Technology Council members, here are 13 common weaknesses among developers, and how leaders can help their teams work through them.

1. Diving Too Deep 

Some developers have a tendency to dive too deep into a single framework and want to learn everything about it, while there might be other options out there that are a better fit for their task out of the box. Computer science is composed of a million layers of abstraction, and better developers stay at the surface level and try many things out at once, diving deeper only when actually necessary. – Thavidu Ranatunga, Fellow Robots

2. Communication Skills 

Developers often have challenges communicating in face-to-face interactions but also in written efforts such as for plans, project materials and non-technical writing. This can be solved at the source by requiring additional writing and public speaking courses. – Steve Delahunty, Arcetyp

3. Complacency 

One of the most common weaknesses I’ve come across is developers becoming complacent in their roles where they stop learning new technologies. I see this as an opportunity for not only developers but also for managers to encourage a learning culture. You can do this by providing free online training, sending developers to conferences and creating hackathons. – Thomas Griffin, OptinMonster

4. Favoring Functionality Over Experience 

Being a developer myself and knowing a lot of developers, I understand that while many are knowledgeable tech geeks, they don’t often use products as early adopters. As opposed to designers, developers judge themselves on their base code rather than UX and value functionality over the overall experience, which can often lead to technically great products that people don’t necessarily love to use. – Zohar Dayan, Wibbitz

5. Consistency 

Maintain high standards of quality constantly. Most of it is a mindset and having the experience to predict how code will break. But that’s not enough. To help with this, checklists are a powerful tool, as described by AtulGawande’s “The Checklist Manifesto.” A written list of items to walk through helps avoid “errors of ineptitude” — mistakes we make because we don’t make proper use of what we know. – Michael Tso, Cloudian.com