I started doing a bit more background reading for an event I'll be heading to later in the week, organized by Modal. Erik Bernhardsson founded Modal, and while I absolutely love his post on building data teams, the quote is from a post about Modal itself.
I spent a lot of time as a CTO, and if I had to condense how to make engineers productive into one thing, it would be something like: make the feedback loops fast.
Another interesting thread in the post is data as a new engineering discipline, and how the 'book of best practices' is still currently being written. Related to this is machine learning engineering; both are relatively new and enjoying a resurgence on the back of the popularity of generative AI.