Clear Focus, Clear Objectives
What makes your tech team a Team
I have spoken to over three hundred engineers throughout my career. Worked with them. Coached them. Debriefed projects gone wrong.
The number one signal that leads to apathy and low morale is having every individual assigned individual tasks by one of the managers.
This isolates them.
This makes them feel powerless.
This makes them stop caring.
This makes your team a liability.
No one likes to be told what to do. Delegate
Stop parallelising your decision makers’ madness. One person wants A, another wants B, a third stakeholder wants C.
If they can all agree on which other priorities should come before their own, you’re in good hands.
Things go real bad real soon when everyone is fighting for control over what a scarce resource (ie. the engineering department’s priorities or sprint backlog).
Instead, try to establish a mutual ritual where you hear out everyone’s priorities and triage them quickly.
Treat an overfull backlog like you would an emergency room with 2 critical patients. Take too long to triage, both of them die.
You need to make hard choices fast.
Eat the frog
Resist the temptation to defer difficult decisions into the future. Especially when it comes to bad news or reprioritisation.
Anything that can happen will happen, and your team will continue supporting leaders as long as the important, heavy-lifting decisions are being tended to.
The team needs to be get into flow, that requires clear objectives, good execution and some cooldown time.
Plan rest time in between large releases
Every release comes with unexpected turning points where you can quickly move a mediocre product to a huge success. But you need to act immediately.
If your modus operandi is to pack your roadmap back-to-back with unrelated features, then the moment the most important day comes around the team immediately switches to another project.
This kills all autonomy and customer obsession. This robs the team of the most important feedback-gathering cycle and demotes them to bug fixing duty.
Plan grace periods around your large releases - keep the team flexible.
I could write more on this, but it would be a shame to dismiss Mike Vernaan’s post from today about this very topic.