Team Principles

Brenda Chan
Sep 7, 2018 · 1 min read

As I’ve gone along on this journey at Pivotal (5 years!?)— I’ve developed some strong opinions about building happy and healthy engineering teams. As I’m getting accustomed to my current role, I decided it would be helpful for myself to state what I personally believe should be true about engineering teams.

R&D Teams

R&D teams should:

  • always be iterating to improve to find what works best for them
  • be a safe space where it’s okay to ask absolutely anything
  • understand what the purpose and intent of a project is and the team as a whole should feel empowered to solve those problems collectively
  • be supportive of one another; continuously celebrating and encouraging the growth of everyone else around

Anchors

Anchors should:

  • work alongside a product manager to understand the problem space the team is tasked to solve
  • continuously help and find opportunities for fellow team members to grow
  • have a large overarching vision of the ecosystem to ensure all the risks and dependencies are made known
  • enforce good architecture and technical decisions such that operability and maintainability are addressed

Engineers

Engineers should:

  • be curious by nature; build a deep understanding of all the components they interact with
  • empathize with the problem space the team is tasked to solve
  • continuously innovate and strive to make things better than they are today
  • collaboratively work with fellow engineers to ensure the solution that is being built is the best solution for the problem
  • think outside the box; understand what the ideal state is and figure out the steps to get there

Written by

Director of Engineering at Pivotal, Cloud R&D. I like solving complex problems and striving to be a little better each and every day.

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