In 2015, building a strong engineering team meant hiring smart people and getting out of their way. If you had people who could code well and weren’t hard to deal with, you were probably ahead of the curve.
Today, that’s no longer enough.
In 2025, engineering teams are dealing with fast product cycles, widely distributed workforces, and the growing role of AI. Speed of execution is important, but so is adaptability, product alignment, and asynchronous collaboration.
In this piece, I want to break down the six traits that define elite engineering teams today, traits that go beyond technical skill and are difficult to fake.
The Shift in What “Great” Looks Like
When Gergely Orosz surveyed hundreds of engineering leaders last year, he found that the biggest bottlenecks to delivery weren’t tools or technical skill, but communication gaps, unclear ownership, and misalignment between teams.
We used to hire engineers to code. Now, we look for people who can drive results, manage themselves, work across global teams, and grow into roles shaped by AI.
If you’re building an engineering team in 2025, here’s what that looks like in practice.
The Real Skills That Matter in 2025
1. Technical Skills Still Matter, But They’re Just the Starting Point
You still need engineers who write clean, testable code and make good architectural decisions. But today, that’s just the entry fee.
Take a look at teams like Linear or Raycast, companies known for small but extremely effective engineering teams. Their engineers ship high-quality code, but also ship frequently, move with urgency, and understand when "good enough" is better than perfect.
Engineers at Linear, for example, are deeply involved in shaping the product and are encouraged to make fast, thoughtful decisions that push things forward without getting stuck in over-engineering. At Raycast, the team prioritizes fast iteration and tight feedback loops, which allows them to launch features that are polished, yet not delayed by perfectionism.
The modern engineer needs to solve real-world problems, not pass theoretical coding interviews.
2. Delivery Ownership Has Become a Differentiator
The best engineers today are those who take goals, ask questions, clarify intent, and deliver value, with or without a perfectly written ticket.
This mindset is common at companies like Doist and GitLab, where engineers are expected to own features end-to-end. At Doist, engineers take responsibility for their work across the entire lifecycle, from planning and architecture to testing, documentation, and post-release improvements.
At GitLab, the approach is similar. Engineers are deeply involved in every stage of development, including writing code, setting up tests, responding to incidents, and even contributing to product direction.
Teams that lack this trait tend to ship slower, get stuck in endless handoffs, and suffer from unclear accountability.
3. Async-First Collaboration Is a Core Skill
Engineering is becoming more and more asynchronous.
Companies like Automattic, Zapier, and Buffer have built fully asynchronous cultures that scale across time zones. Their engineers write clearly, update proactively, and communicate through thoughtful documentation.
At Automattic, engineers use internal blogs called P2s to share progress, float ideas, and gather feedback. Zapier relies on clear, accessible documentation for everything from onboarding to product decisions. At Buffer, transparency plays a central role in how the team operates. Engineers regularly share updates, make their work visible, and are trusted to move forward without needing constant oversight.
This trait is for any team that wants to reduce coordination overhead, not just for remote teams. Yet most hiring processes still don’t test for it.
4. Product Thinking Isn’t Just for PMs Anymore
If your engineers don’t understand how their work connects to user problems, you’ll end up with bloated features, rework, or worse: things that ship but don’t move the needle.
Great engineers in 2025 think in trade-offs. They understand what “done” means in the context of the product, and they’re comfortable negotiating scope or suggesting alternatives.
Look at Figma. Their engineering culture is intentionally built around product thinking. Engineers are active participants in product reviews, roadmap discussions, and design critiques. They’re encouraged to ask why, not just how. That might mean skipping a flashy feature in favor of a faster, more intuitive user flow, or flagging edge cases early before they become usability issues.
5. AI Fluency Is Quietly Becoming a Core Skill
This one is new and rising fast.
A survey by Stack Overflow found that in 2024, 76% of developers were either already using AI tools or planning to, up from 70% the year before. The tools developers reached for most often were GitHub Copilot and ChatGPT. They were using them to write code, fix bugs, draft documentation, and even get help thinking through system design.
Engineers who know how to prompt effectively, validate AI-generated code, and integrate AI APIs responsibly are starting to pull ahead.
You don’t need every engineer to be an ML researcher. But basic AI literacy is becoming as important as knowing Git or understanding REST.
And yet again, most hiring processes don’t assess this.
6. Strategic Flexibility Is the Glue That Holds It Together
Engineering teams in 2025 are constantly dealing with change. They face shifting markets, team restructures, updated roadmaps, and funding ups and downs.
In this kind of environment, adaptable engineers are incredibly valuable. They can zoom out, adjust their role when needed, and stay focused even when things are uncertain.
These are the people who can jump into a project halfway through, figure out what’s going on, ask smart questions, and bring order to a messy situation. You’ll often find them in fast-moving startups or scaleups, where things are rarely fully planned out. Instead of getting stuck, they help the team move forward.
Outdated Hiring Habits Are Holding Teams Back
The challenge is that most hiring processes still emphasize technical interviews and cultural “vibes.” They don’t test for delivery ownership. They don’t check for async fluency. They don’t explore product thinking or AI awareness.
These are the exact areas where high-performing engineers differentiate themselves.
Which means most teams are hiring for the wrong traits, and paying the price in slower shipping, internal tension, and unscalable communication patterns.
What This Means for Engineering Leaders
If you're leading an engineering team in 2025, here’s something worth asking:
Are we building a team of people who just write code, or a team that takes full ownership of what they deliver?
The difference matters.
Coders often need detailed instructions, regular check-ins, and close supervision. People who own outcomes, on the other hand, take a goal, ask the right questions, and figure out how to get it done.
Coders focus on shipping code. Outcome owners focus on making an impact.
If your goal is to move fast, stay flexible, and build something that can scale, you need the second kind of team.
If this sounds like the kind of team you want to build, you're not alone. At Adeva, engineers are also screened for autonomy, communication, and delivery ownership. These are the exact traits we’ve covered in this post. Adeva’s approach to vetting talent aligns with how high-performing engineering teams work today: outcome-focused, async-ready, and built for speed.
Final Thoughts
The engineering teams doing well right now are keeping up with AI, shipping consistently, and attracting strong talent.
They’ve stopped chasing credentials and started hiring for what matters: ownership, clarity, and real-world impact.
This shift is helping them move faster, make better decisions, and build things that deliver value.
