Successful teams

Successful teams deliver successful projects. As a lead, how do you build a successful team?

There are many factors to build a successful team, but the foundation of them all is safety. Can problems be discussed openly? Does everyone trust everyone else? And once you have that, the team can build. Build diversity, build towards a common goal, and build something that matters.

Successful Google team

Google defines successful teams according to its research at https://rework.withgoogle.com/blog/five-keys-to-a-successful-google-team/

Psychological safety: Can we take risks on this team without feeling insecure or embarrassed?

Dependability: Can we count on each other to do high quality work on time?

Structure & clarity: Are goals, roles, and execution plans on our team clear?

Meaning of work: Are we working on something that is personally important for each of us?

Impact of work: Do we fundamentally believe that the work we’re doing matters?

I accept, given multiple ongoing accusations against them about defending toxic managers and culture, that Google may not be living these values. However, these are clear statements that are supported by other studies such as The Game Outcomes project.

So how do we build a team like that?

Number one thing, and the only way I’ve found success, is to empower the team and everyone within it to make changes. Without that ownership, nothing matters.

Once you have that, you as the leader have to own the rest. Delegate where you need to, but own your team’s safety, support, direction, purpose and motivation.

Safety

Are you free to take risks and try something new?

Not everything you do will be a success, so do you celebrate knowledge and learning as a goal? Yes, that cost us time and money, but we learned not to do that again

Are team members supported? When someone mansplains your tech lead, do you correct them, and ensure her voice is heard? When a deaf developer joins the team, do you ask whether they prefer lip reading or sign, and help the team adapt appropriately? Do you recognise colour? Do you use preferred pronouns?

When mistakes are made, do you find someone to blame or do you all accept responsibility to address it? If the production database can be deleted by the graduate on their first day, and there are no backups, that is never their fault.

Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace https://hbr.org/ideacast/2019/01/creating-psychological-safety-in-the-workplace

High Quality

Do you always have an high standard?

Everyone has their code reviewed, especially the lead. Is every line of code, and every process open to review and improvement? Great that you’re agile, but if you really value people over process, write the process down, and follow it. It doesn’t mean no process, it means that process serves the people, not the other way around. It means you change it when it no longer supports the people or the product.

What are your quality standards for code, for user experience, for security, and most importantly for behaviour? How are they enforced? And are they always enforced on time, every time?

Have policies. Do not have a daily fight over tabs vs spaces.

Tweet

Direction

Ask everyone on your team what the team is building. If you get more than one answer, that’s a bug.

Ask everyone which part everyone else on the team plays towards that. Does that match how they see their role? Are there any gaps in responsibility?

Ask everyone what their priority is and why. Is anyone blocked? Ask them what their next priority is and if they have everything they need to fulfil it. If not, do they know where to get it?

Purpose

Is everyone bringing their whole self to work? Do office politics make them wary? Are they in a marginalized group and they have to bring representation as well as talent, and they are having to do both jobs at once?

At the office, is this the number one thing for them to be doing? Are your developers feeling stuck in support or BA? Are they frustrated that they aren’t allowed to refactor a gnarly piece of code that’s very open to be improved because “it works, don’t touch it”.

Does everyone on the team feel empowered to speak up and to fix things where they interfere with the goal of the team?

Motivation

Ask everyone why the team is building what they’re building, and why their part is important.

How will this change the user’s day? How will it affect the company? What’s the net improvement?

The Game Outcomes formulation

If you don’t like the Google formulation, try the game outcomes one. There’s plenty that applies to non-game projects. There’s a few negatives to avoid, and I’ll revisit them in a later post.

The most important indicators for success from the Game Outcomes project are:

1. Great game development teams have a clear, shared vision of the game design and the development plan and an infectious enthusiasm for that vision.
2. Great game development teams carefully manage the risks to the design vision and the development plan.
3. Members of great game development teams buy into the decisions that are made.
4. Great game development teams avoid crunch (overtime).
5. Great gamedev teams build an environment where it’s safe to take a risk and stick your neck out to say what needs to be said.
6. Great gamedev teams do everything they can to minimize turnover and avoid changing the team composition except for growing it when needed. This includes avoiding disruptive re-organizations as much as possible.
7. Great gamedev teams resolve interpersonal conflicts swiftly and professionally.
8. Great gamedev teams have a clearly-defined mission statement and/or set of values, which they genuinely buy into and believe in. This matters FAR more than you might think.
9. Great gamedev teams keep the feedback loop going strong. No one should go too long without receiving feedback on their work.
10. Great gamedev teams celebrate novel ideas, even if they don’t achieve their intended result. All team members need the freedom to fail, especially creative ones.

How do you keep your team on the right path?

We all want to work on successful projects, and there’s been a couple of times in my career I’ve been lucky enough to work in a team where everyone is delivering 10x. 10x developers don’t work in isolation, they work on teams where all the above needs are met, and they thrive off each other.

It’s great to have that dream team, but start by thinking about how to make your team reliably successful, and you’ll be doing better than most software teams.