How to Build a Great Team

How I learned sweet taste of working as a team

Right after college I started working as a developer at a NYC internet media company. There were many sites and projects. So, each developer worked on their own project.

The projects were first spec’ed out in detail in a large document. A designer took one of them and a design came out at the other end. Then the designs and the specs were sent to the lowly developer for final implementation.

I kind of liked executing a well defined spec on my own. Working alone actually gave me freedom to move at my own pace. I made my own mistakes and learned from them. Since I never really experienced working in a well jelled team before I thought that was as good as it gets.

This continued for 5 years. Until I decided it was time for me to strike on my own. I had too much ambitious ideas than to implement same old specs day in day out.

When I hired my first employee the old habits didn’t end. I knew that waterfall is bad so I didn’t give him a detailed spec but I still let him work on his own.

We were together in a small office. We went to lunch together. We discussed ideas all day so we were always very excited. We were always coming up with good ideas. Then we improved those ideas further with more discussion. That’s when I started to get how a team should be.

Center of Gravity

I slowly grew my team. Still, it took me very long time to learn the single most important lesson in building an amazing team.

A great team focuses on a single goal and builds momentum around it and pushes the ideas forward every single day.

The team must work together. The team must build gravity around the goal. The team’s center of gravity is the goal.

The worst thing you can do to a team is to give each person their own kingdoms. Let them be on their own. Let them do their own things. That’s not a team. That’s individuals working separately on the same product.

Let’s say you have projects A, B and C. They all have the same importance. And, you have three developers. Common sense says that you should give each person a single project so they can all work in parallel. That’s exactly the worst thing you can do.

A single person working alone on a project never performs well. There is no discussions. The first idea gets executed. There is no sharing of experiences. The level of motivation and excitement is lowest. The ideas don’t get to develop on their own. You get half-assed results.

A good team has a single goal at a single moment in time. Team members clearly know what the goal is. They get excited about it. They discuss and develop ideas. People share previous experiences. When someone gets stuck the team comes together to move forward. Hard problems turn into exciting discussions.

Team work is something we learned as children and then we forgot. Team sports are all about getting a bunch of people run around to accomplish a goal. We literally call it “goal”.

Facebook consists of small teams that are organized around ideas. The goal of Engagement Team is to get people to use Facebook more. The engagement team thinks about problems, comes up with ideas, designs solutions, executes them and then comes up with even more ideas after looking at the data.

Great teams are small and cross functional.

Great teams are small. The cut off is around 10 people. Any larger, the communication overhead becomes hard to manage. If you have more people the solution is to split them into separate sub-teams.

Great teams are cross-functional. A team might contain developers, designers, business and marketing people, psychologists and data scientists.

Great teams have a single clear goal. They gravitate towards that goal without effort. Like a black hole, closer they get to the goal, the pull increases. They get faster. They get more excited. Momentum builds up. That’s how you build great products.