The Team is the Product
What does your team need to succeed?
Today’s Crafting Tech Teams issue is about the Team as a unit. There’s plenty of advice on how to inspire individuals. There’s plenty of methodologies on how to manage a project. You’re spending a fortune on management tools.
Unfortunately, the least invested-into aspect of a Tech Team is the team itself.
Professional Service/Product Providers
As an avid reader you’ll know I’ve been in tech for nearly 20 years at the time of this post. I’ve been in and out of many teams, especially now as a tech leadership and craftsmanship coach.
If you’re in a hurry today— this is the only chapter you’ll need to take a step.
The Team requires an IDENTITY.
Think of your favorite restaurant. You know it. What it’s like on a bad day. On a good day. You don’t show up at your favorite restaurant expecting to have to manage the kitchen or train the waiter.
Why is that?
Does it have something to do with how you perceive them as professionals? Reliable. Experts at what they do. This isn’t a coincidence. That restaurant set out to do this. It is part of their mission. Many teams don’t.
Set an intention of being end-to-end professionals.
Manage the team’s and the product’s financials
Understand why the big features are valuable. To whom?
Understand how the revenue is captured
Integrate product owners and managers into the team
Seriously, at most companies, startups— Product isn’t a department. It’s just a person overseeing design and UX. Get them on the team!
Adapt the Team to the Product you want to build
Whatever competence your team lacks, the product will lack as well. This is an easy fix when you understand your process and understand what you are building.
Unfortunately, many companies silo this beneath management layers and organisational politics.
To create a complete team, you need to learn how to navigate this landscape so that you can change the team every time your target product changes.
Stop putting departments and team names on contracts. Keep everyone mobile.
Map the needs of the product and customers.
Then plan the team.
Then ask that team to adjust the process to serve those customers with a new product or features
Standardising processes with tools like Jira and ClickUp are the least important of the team’s worries.
Appoint a Chief Engineer
Taking inspiration from Lean Software Development— it’s crucial to have a Chief Engineer role on the team. This isn’t the most senior person on the team. This isn’t the highest paid person on the team. The Chief Engineer is the appointed decision maker for Engineering and Product decisions.
He or she is accountable for the success of the product and ensures the team is suitably staffed and well-coordinated. This has to be a person on the team, working every day with the team on the product.
When I witness slow, batched teams— the largest contributor for the slowdown is the Chief Engineer being a non-technical person way too far from the team: a second-line manager, VP of Product who manages 5 things without any ICs, etc. I’m sure you’ve seen this.
Aim for Maximum Growth
To enable the high performance gear, the team needs 3 ingredients:
Challenge time
Focus time
Slack time
You invest some time into learning. A lot of time into focusing on the product with the team. This is not solo time. And then having enough manoeuvrability to adapt to uncertainties and recover from any emergencies. A high performing team’s optimal utilisation is 65-80%.
This means that after accounting for organisation-specific logistics and company-wide meetings, the team gets to plan 65-80% of the remaining time. On normal cadence, this is usually 4-5 hours per day.
Most slow, batched teams overestimate how much scope they can cover, underestimate their potential, are overworked and constantly late.
Be ahead of the burnout: to optimise high utilisation and focus, time box the team’s for-product availability to the minimum necessary. This is where lean, agile scope cutting begins.
You don’t have as much time as you think you do.
You aren’t as fast as you think you are.
But you can still deliver much sooner!
Discussion on Tech Excellence
I gave a talk on Tech Excellence covering these topics. Look for the fox in the video. You might find the second section useful.
