The Overlooked Aspects of Successful Development Teams
How to nurture successful attitudes into your culture
Originally published in 2020, this was my first written article before creating a newsletter or blog of any kind. There are details and ideas in the article I would have written differently today, but I leave it mostly in its original form so you can see the contrast, sort of like a time capsule. Enjoy!
I’m going to talk to you about a topic that’s very dear to me. Countless work environments fall short on a handful of crucial ingredients to making sure their teams don’t deteriorate.
Once on the wrong path, they end up being too expensive and too slow to deal with — too conflict-prone and toxic to work in and recruit for.
If you are new, welcome to 🔮 Crafting Tech Teams. I publish to you every week on how to become a better engineering leader. As a subscriber you will receive these posts straight to your favorite inbox.
Free subscribers get access to about half of each paid post and the free content related to the book club and 🏔 Our Tech Journey.
Whenever you’d like to become a paid subscriber you will receive full access to all content including early previews of books and coaching I offer.
My Experience
Over the past decade, I’ve had the fortunate pleasure of working with and mentoring many brilliant minds and souls from whom I’ve learned, been inspired, and shared trust and comfort with. Sometimes they required my help or have offered theirs when I was stuck.
There’s something inexplicably beautiful about the sheer joy and excitement of going to work so you can tackle an interesting challenge with your team. They’re just as excited as you are — the momentum of progress in the air is a firm grasp of peer pressure on your shoulders with a sweet undertone of trust and humility.
A number of my friends and clients often contrast and challenge this reality with their own harrowing descriptions of toxic work environments — the gnawing dredge of feeling taken advantage of, impossible hours, unrealistic deadlines, unresolved trust issues, questionable work ethics. The list is as long as it is colourful.
Working in this industry, I’m sure you have your own similar stories along this spectrum that I’d love to hear about. While you reminisce on your adventures, let me share some findings with you that I’ve come to cherish and rely on more and more over the years.
Look Beyond Technical Ability
If I were to imagine your team members as discrete nuggets in a cloud that you had to describe and label as minimally and eloquently as possible, I’m confident the terms back end, front end, designer, UX g̵u̵y̵ ̵g̵i̵r̵l̵ ninja, manager, QA, and DevOps would be on the forefront of everyone’s list. These labels might seem crucial at first, especially in a large stratified multinational.
Over time, however, people come and go — you change jobs, and you slowly start to notice that how you interacted with the back-end devs in your old job is completely different to the new one. Maybe the designer is doing his own UX in this startup, while at the old one you were getting sketches and InDesigns from three different people.
Why is that? How come the same title and role have seemingly such vague meanings and vastly different boundaries across different companies in such a seemingly homogenised industry?
As the titles slowly start to mishmash together, I started discerning more useful personality traits and talents to look out for. These are among my favourites:
Negotiator — the person in your team who can sit down and draw the line in the sand to seek a better solution to the seemingly weak hand of cards you’ve been dealt
Empath — probably the only extrovert on your dev team with a bizarre excitement to read user feedback
Athlete — calm and collected, a possible source of discipline on your team. Eats healthy and remains the coolest head in the room when production goes down.
Pessimist— the person on your team who finds ten problems to every opportunity. Usually right about at least one of those but might require some help and camaraderie regarding self-control and optimism.
Motivator — notices you’ve been plugged in for two days in a row and are feeling a bit down or even anxious. Can always lift your mood and makes great coffee.
Hustler — chaotic, lone wolf, always enthusiastic. Hackathon is his/her middle name. Dreaded in summer, cherished during crunch time.
Most of the time you’ll find a varied combination of these roles in every team member. I’ve found that these traits and skills predict success and team chemistry to a much higher degree than traditional roles, even when taking seniority into account.
Recruit for the Team, Not the CPU
Let’s play a little game of dev-recruitment bingo. Check your favourite recruiter, Stack Overflow jobs, or your own job listing. Take a s̵h̵o̵t̵ sip of fruit juice every time you find one of the following: has a passion for language x, three years of experience for junior position, is current on the latest framework y, maintains a high standard, writes readable code and documentation, and has worked with microservices/REST/GraphQL.
Getting dizzy? You’re not alone! I’ve seen very few job listings in the past few years deviate from this recipe, and it’s always the same story (even when it’s me doing the recruiting). (1) A CV flies in, (2) the recruiter ticks some checkbox, (3) you throw everything through the window because you decide based on (a) the interview or (b) a coding exercise (or both).
Nowadays when I’m doing any form of recruitment or applying for a job, 90% of my CV and vetting is based on aligning personal core values with those of the company and meeting the team. It’s basically a romantic date. What follows if we “click” is a respectful, realistic negotiation of what you want and what they want. That’s it, that’s all you need.
If you want a sustainable and viable recruitment strategy, then recruit to meet the needs of the people on your team, not the framework within your code base. At the end of the day, you want to work with a competent buddy, not an overachiever who can’t play on the team.
Junior, Mid, or Senior?
Surprisingly, this particular nuance has seen a lot of debate over the past few years, so I’m not going to dwell too much on it. I think Daan’s brief article summarises and captures it perfectly.
Go on, read it. I’ll wait.
We good? OK.
The one thing I’d add here is ultimately these titles are extremely predicated on your own ability to sell your services. I’ve seen many candidates with above-average talent who are too anxious during interviews to leave their introvert suit. They often end up in a junior position unsuited for their level of skill with a ceiling above their head. Your talent and personality is a business — it’s imperative you learn to market and sell yourself.
Your Boss is Part of Your Team
Whoever dons the mantle of (official) leader for the team often gets spurred and shunned into a different stratosphere of species, sometimes even accompanied with derogatory terms like manager or scrum master.
Leadership skills are an oft-neglected aspect to any team-based venture. Most of the time, there’s too much focus on training the leader and not enough emphasis on building relationships within the team, learning how to follow, and listen with humility.
To quote the former U.S. Navy Seal Leif Babin (co-author of “Extreme Ownership” with Jocko Willink): “If you want to be the most effective leader, you absolutely have to be a follower as well.” And vice-versa — in order to follow someone else’s direction, you need to learn how to lead.
This is crucial for your ability to maintain a positive mindset. This is one of the most overlooked aspects of career training and skill building inside teams, especially when people are being promoted up and down the echelons with seemingly only technical criteria.
Your relationship and trust towards your immediate boss and closest team members will singularly dictate your overall enjoyment and fulfillment on your journey in any company throughout your career.
If you’re pressed for time or energy and have to limit yourself to only one course of action from this article to apply at your job, I’d wholeheartedly single out this aspect. Focus on building and maintaining a relationship with your immediate superior. Always. No exceptions.
Bonus Tip: Make it Fun
The most important thing you can do with life, in fact the only thing you can do in life is experience it. At the end of the day the destination is ephemeral — what matters is the experience, the journey, the road.
We’re in an industry that focuses on deadlines and deliverables, but that mindset is only useful for the economics of your process and the lines of code. It’s a quite harmful strategy for your mindset, for your own mental health. If you think you’re hustling and there’s fulfillment at the end of the rainbow, you’re in for a shocking surprise.
Sometimes you might be tempted to throw relationships with your team members or family plans under the bus to reach a deadline. And sometimes you might even consider doing it for some semblance of the “greater good.”
But I can guarantee you the aspect of your work that’ll shape the future of your career and your memories of the journey is how you were treated along the ride and how the relationships with your team members unfolded.
You’ll make friends for life, and you’ll burn some bridges. Focus on being the person who brings a certain humane joy for the art and the work you’re sharing, and avoid the pitfall of being the jerk on your team. You don’t need to be a hero, but you certainly don’t want to be the star of a horror movie.
The best advice I can give you on this particular subject is to imagine how you’d want your co-workers to feel by working with you today and help them achieve that regardless of the bliss or storm you’re going through.
Closing Words
I’d like to sincerely thank you for your interest and patience by indulging me this far. Which aspect resonates with your journey? I look forward to reading your inspiring stories in the comments and DMs.
I believe in fair exchanges. If you use the referral button below, you’ll have an opportunity to earn free access to the premium and paid content. Just three referrals will earn a free month!