How Lucid helps engineers maintain accuracy, velocity, and standardization

The entire workflow of an engineer is a balancing act between accuracy, velocity, and standardization. It’s not just about quickly shipping a product; it’s about being intentional about how a team collaborates, operates, and iterates so that a job well done can be a job that’s consistently repeated. We all want to launch products and features swiftly, but not at the cost of quality. There is something to be said about balancing team velocity with accurate information and standardized workflows. 

We sat down with Ryan Running, senior product marketing manager at Lucid, to get his take on these challenges. His perspective is that though these three pillars can be tough to master, they are vital for building a high-performing engineering team. In this article, we explore his insights on why these principles are challenging and how engineers can use Lucid to maintain accuracy, boost velocity, and streamline standardization.

Accuracy

Why it's important

Accuracy is the foundation on which everything else is built. Without accuracy, every decision you make is a calculated risk. If information is inaccurate in the beginning stages of the project, whether that be a flawed diagram or outdated documentation, the entire project is thrown off, causing delays, costly rework, and demoralized teams.

If processes, visualizations, and documentation are inaccurate, everything else will inevitably crumble. 

Why it's hard to achieve

Creating and maintaining a single source of truth is difficult with so many moving parts. According to Lucid’s work acceleration survey of over 2,100 knowledge workers worldwide, 44% of respondents expressed that misalignment was a major blocker in their workflow.

Important information often lives on different apps, text documents, and locked spreadsheets, creating a fragmented workflow. This makes it impossible to ensure people are looking at the same information and that it stays up-to-date. 

How Lucid enables accuracy

With Lucid, teams can easily create a central place for documenting systems and processes, ensuring all team members are working with current and accurate data. Plus, with the added layer of visual collaboration, teams can work together confidently, knowing they have the most updated information for projects and tasks.

Team hubs provide a centralized location to house all team work, eliminating information silos. Instead of searching through spreadsheets, documents, emails, and chat threads, your team’s resources can live in one, organized place.

Embedded links transform a static document into a living canvas. Within your Lucid document, you can link out to Google Workspace, Microsoft OneDrive, Confluence, and more. What’s more, any changes you make to your external documents will automatically be reflected in Lucid. This way, your team can pull multiple sources into one workspace from one document, knowing they have the most accurate information.

“Self-inflicted setbacks are the most painful. Having accurate, up-to-date process documentation helps teams avoid these frustrating setbacks and limit risk during projects. With dozens of integrations, data-backed diagrams, approval processes, and centralized repositories, Lucid has everything your teams need to keep that documentation accurate and accessible.”— Ryan Running, senior product marketing manager, Lucid

Velocity

Why it's important 

More than just quickly building and launching a feature, velocity is measured by the work a team accomplishes within a time period, like a sprint. It is a performance metric often used in Agile and Scrum methodologies and helps teams better understand how they collaborate. Velocity is about performance longevity and continuous improvement.

Why it is hard to achieve 

Even the most well-planned projects can be bogged down by common project disruptions. Last-minute design changes, feedback from stakeholders, and poorly communicated dependencies can slow momentum.

But that’s not all—disconnected knowledge silos exemplify the struggle. If a team member is on PTO or leaves the company, their expertise often leaves with them. The team is left scrambling to find diagrams, sheets, and documents containing critical project information, causing yet another deadline pushback.

How Lucid enables velocity

Fortunately, teams that use Lucid can eliminate the friction that slows them down. By providing a truly collaborative platform, Lucid empowers teams to build a shared understanding as they work. When complexities are visualized, teams get on the same page more quickly, reducing the need for meetings and allowing engineers to focus on building. 

Visual Activities help leaders quickly see where a team is at for various topics, speeding up the prioritization process, getting quick feedback, gauging bandwidth, and more. 

 

The Lucid Cards for Jira integration turns your Jira backlog into a dynamic, collaborative workspace. With bidirectional sync, teams can visualize project dependencies and brainstorm ideas, and then convert them into Jira issues without ever leaving the canvas. This makes project planning more engaging, helping align your team and stakeholders and keeping the momentum going.

Airfocus is now a part of Lucid, and together, Lucid and airfocus fuse flexibility with structure, allowing product managers to move past the rigidity of product roadmaps and into a dynamic workflow. Teams can now brainstorm and plan ideas in Lucid and then seamlessly send them back to airfocus to create strong, data-backed roadmaps. Connect collaborative ideation directly to your plan of action, ensuring every feature you build is impactful. 

“IT and engineering teams are constantly asked to get more done with fewer resources. Lucid provides collaboration and visualization features like our Jira integration with dynamic tables and timelines that help teams align quickly on the highest impact work to be done.” — Ryan Running, senior product marketing manager, Lucid

Standardization

Why it's important

Standardization bridges the gap between individual efforts and a scalable system. It’s the process of agreeing on a single way to do things so that every team member can work consistently. Without it, misalignment takes over, causing a slew of issues. Deadlines get missed, team morale diminishes, and goals fail to be reached. 

In fact, the work acceleration survey reported that one in five respondents felt that having access to standardized, updated process documentation would save them three or more hours a day, nearly half the workweek.

Why it is hard to achieve

Standardizing processes and procedures can be extremely difficult. Without proper tools, it can be a laborious, overwhelming task, and it may feel like a waste of time. But with the right platform, it can transform workflows and unify teams and stakeholders. 

How Lucid enables standardization

Lucid helps teams create a repository of repeatable work, which ensures effective standardization as your teams evolve. The system isn’t rigid; it’s a flexible framework that adapts to your needs while remaining consistent.

Lucid templates let you quickly create documentation, diagrams, and other dynamic visualizations. To take it a step further, you can create themes to style your documents to align with your brand and style.

Lucid’s Process Accelerator helps engineering teams standardize how work gets done by creating a single, searchable source of truth. Organizations can efficiently manage knowledge repositories and the content within them. Any updates to that content must go through an approval flow before they are published. They also have access to an asset library to accelerate process documentation and increase standardization. Not only does this keep people on the same page, but it speeds up stakeholder approval. 

 

“Companies with standardized practices and workflows reduce their risk and increase efficiency. With Lucid’s blueprints, templates, and process management capabilities, teams can implement standard workflows and keep them up-to–date, spending less time figuring out how to accomplish the work and instead moving forward with confidence and alignment.”  — Ryan Running, senior product marketing manager, Lucid

Through Lucid, teams can not only achieve accuracy, velocity, and standardization but also sustain this level of high-quality work.