Hey everyone,

I am the lead software developer at a small startup (we have 3 full-time developers). For context, the company has two divisions: custom software, and IT services. I am the head of the custom software division, and the CEO of the company also heads the IT division.

Lately, my CEO has started asking me to implement more software development process such as using something to track tickets (like trello, jira), spending more time to measure developer productivity, and implementing a more rigid process where I would be the one assigning my developers to tasks and then tracking their success rate. Pretty standard stuff at a larger company.

My personal opinion is that we have such a small team (we all work next to each other at the office), that this would be a waste of time. I work very closely with all my developers, but I like to give them more autonomy and don't want to micromanage their tasks, as long as our projects are getting done.

In my experience, assigning tickets, tracking productivity, creating sprints, etc. comes with a lot of time overhead, and I don't believe this would be of benefit to our small company, since we are constantly swamped with work as it is. I asked my CEO to trust me to subjectively measure productivity, as I work will my devs every day.

I have hand-picked my devs, and I like the flexibility where we can all switch off on various projects without having to worry about "finishing my ticket", or "finishing the sprint objectives". We basically just collaboratively figure out the most efficient use of dev time by talking to each other, and I assign a "lead" to each project, to ensure accountability to timelines.

No tickets. No sprints. No meetings. No anything. We just figure everything out together by talking to each other at the office.

I can understand my CEO's perspective too. He feels like he doesn't have enough quantifiable data to make decisions on salary, etc.

What are your guys' thoughts with implementing process at a very small company?