At the top of their game
Great teams thrive on pace, trust, and versatility. More slow songs are discovered.
Teams at the top of their game have a few things going for them. They operate with pace and confidence, reducing the need for time-consuming and detailed planning. They work together with coherence and trust, anticipating each other’s actions and decisions. This lets each individual on the team act with high agency to solve problems and act upon feedback quickly.
Pace and confidence are crucial. Good teams rise to excellence by figuring out how to go faster via reduced friction and smaller increments. Occasionally, this means fighting their tools less or experimenting with removing process steps that aren’t worth the squeeze. It often means finding ways to answer questions (hypotheses) faster or get feedback sooner.
Teams that ship daily can work up to a pace where estimation and planning are less critical. They’ve moved the threshold of risk higher. It’s not necessary to fully plan and sequence the work because iterations are more abundant. Each iteration is less risky! Failing one out of every ten iterations is a problem; failing ten out of one hundred is accelerated learning. (Don’t try this if you’re operating a federal government, please!)
Teams without coherence and trust may operate at a high level for a time, but are susceptible to falling down the hierarchy when things go sideways. A newly formed (or recently restructured) team operates at first on faith. Through shared experiences, faith turns into confidence that colleagues will do what they say, say what they mean, and support each other. That’s trust!
Coherence turns team trust into anticipating each other’s moves without needing explicit communication. A team that knows each other’s strengths and weaknesses and delegates to each other effectively is coherent. A team that uses specific jargon to compress big ideas down to high-functioning conversations is coherent. A team that rallies around a challenge to update their shared understanding, decide on a solution, and sprint together to finish it is coherent.
This all builds upon individual capability and agency. It’s easier for teams to complete work when specialization is minimal. If everyone on the team knows how to, for example, animate a screen transition or write a new database migration, shipping to iterate is easier. Planning around specialized knowledge doesn’t become a chronic blocker. When team members possess broad technical capability and confidence, they can contribute across domains without waiting (i.e., blocking) on their teammates. This creates the foundation for those seamless 'no-look passes' that characterize excellent teams.
A team of versatile, highly capable individuals who can independently ship and gather feedback develops collective agency. Through iteration, they build the intuition to decide what problem to solve next and move the slow processes of designing and planning into the team's collective mind. Instead of waiting for a teammate or leader to approve their next move, the team can proceed with the assumption that changing course won’t cause too much short-term pain. A change in course might even generate better information for the team to make future decisions with, accelerating progress even further.
Recently on the blog:
We weren’t meant to collaborate in text boxes! — The situation here has improved over the past few years. But, I think we still spend too much time collaborating in one-dimensional boxes. My kingdom for higher-dimensionality in our communication and coordination.
Tina Turner was also very good at slow songs. — I write about the virtues of slow performances and the universe continues to provide.
Conceptual compression is a big deal. — Maybe application data sync is the next frontier of compressing all the ideas needed to build modern software.
Our calendars show order, but not disorder (chaos). — Perhaps this is why a day full of meetings is so depleting; a packed day may not indicate even half of the energy required to get through the day.
Thanks for reading!