Help your team to become a SUPER TEAM!

Let’s say that you were recently promoted to a managerial position, and you are eager to find advice, or you just have been managing some teams and are looking for different experiences on how other people do their daily work.

You came to the right place! My name is Leo, and I’m extremely proud of being part of BestSecret where I specifically focus on the Mobile Apps world where I help my teams to maximise their potential.

There are five main foundations I focus on to define my work:

• Purpose
• People
• Product
• Processes
• Third party influences

Depending on the moment in which your team or organisation is going through, some would become more important to implement right now while other might have to be postponed for applying in the future.

Let’s dig deeper into them:

Purpose

Establish a mission

The purpose or mission is just the reason for the team to exist.

It’s remarkable how much potential motived employees have to contribute towards your organisation. As a leader, this is one of the most important things you need to consider.

Engineers, in general are already highly motivated to do their daily job. It’s not a straightforward career option where constant learning is required. As motivation comes from within, you just need to guide them.

Creating a “mission” where your team can see the reasoning behind what the company is doing will inspire and keep everyone engaged. This is critical in terms of creating the vision which becomes more important than the daily job. Eventually, this mission can be broken down into smaller team milestones.

People

People is the most important asset in any company. Therefore, it’s important you spend the right amount of time your colleagues deserve providing the support they need.

Care

In my experience, connecting with your teammates is fundamental, really care about them, as over being a professional, you are interacting with a human being.

Establish a recurrent space where you can create the trust for your team mates to have honest conversations. Use this space to empower and guide them.

Be there for your team and provide support. Pay attention to the daily basis development and bring notes to this meeting where discussions should arise regarding how to keep improving, from a broad range of topics like individual contribution, career development, or even defining together a plan to help the team from within.

Culture

The team culture is the combination of values, beliefs, attitudes and behavior shared by a team. It’s the way the team works towards achieving a common goal.

The best teams are those who care about each other (this is crucial), and the success (or even failure) is never linked with a particular individual, instead it’s always a shared thing.

Focusing on learning when making mistakes is an excellent way of avoiding finger pointing and blaming while generating a layer of trust, which is key in the success of any organisation.

Celebrating success, feel real ownership for your products, care about it each other, recurrent feedback, trust, appreciation… are some of the values you, as a leader, should aim for in your team.

Professional growth

When you have established trust and honest recurrent conversations, it’s the right moment where you can really help them to get better.

I really like guiding towards finding a balance between technical excellence, high quality and fulfilling business goals.

Scheduling times of the year where you got specific room for talking about career progression is highly recommended. You can use these slots to set up goals which can be reviewed.

By setting goals, you set a clear target to aim for. I recommend setting SMART goals, where they are:

• Specific
• Measurable (so you can track its evolution).
• Achievable (you need to both agree on it).
• Relevant (reasonable, motivating and realistic for the career).
• Time bound (timeframe that needs to be respected).

Then, it’s your responsibility, to set up the right environment for your employee to grow.

In addition to setting individual professional goals, setting team goals is also highly recommended.

It’s very beneficial as would help the team to stick together and behave as one.

Feedback

I can’t stress enough how important this topic is. Working in an environment in which feedback flows in all directions makes it extremely rich. As a leader, it’s your duty you to set it up.

Always assume the best intentions, and when providing feedback, focus on the fact, never on the person.

Do not forget the huge power positive feedback has. Receiving positive reinforcement will help the receiver to keep doing that thing you really liked. There are studies that show that when a person’s hard work is acknowledged and appreciated, motivation to keep doing it goes over the roof.

When someone provides feedback to you, it means that person cares about your growth. Always receive it as a gift. Be grateful and really listen to it.

Product

While you need to keep an eye on perceptions regarding how much we are all contributing towards the product, having objective metrics would really make a different to find out how much you are progressing.

Depending on your industry, different metrics should be established so your work is measured towards.

For example, how do you know that your product is getting better in terms of quality? Establishing an Index you can measure often will give you the details you need.

In our Apps world, there are some variables we take into consideration with different weights:

• Code coverage
• Crash free rate
• Criticality of the bugs raised (sorted by “area”)
• Loading time per feature
• App Market rating (AppStore and GooglePlay)
• Customer satisfaction
• Conversion rate
• And so on

As you can see, these variables on their own provide little value, but all together do provide a good big picture.

What the isolated value the formula returns, does not matter, what it’s important is that you make sure this value keeps raising over time.

The above are just “our” examples, and different companies would focus on different variables and weights according to different needs. Consider yours and start measuring.

Processes

We know that in general terms, the whole Software Development industry has been using “Agile methodologies” for some time now for incrementing the value of their products iteratively.

While you use Kanban, Scrum, Extreme Programming, Lean Software Development or a mix of them, eventually you just want to support and embrace the 12 Agile principles that were created back in 2001 in the Agile Manifesto.

There are different metrics you can use here, but I really like the ones that Accelerate proposes:

• Deployment frequency: How often do you reach your user with an increment in your product?
• Lead time for changes: How long does it take you to release your changes?
• Mean Time to Restore: How long does it take you to restore your system when a critical bug was introduced?
• Change Failure Rate: Out of all your releases, how many of them are stable?

Obviously, this is a simplification on how optimised your processes are. But in my experience, while you could add a few more that would fit your team focusing on them really show how mature your work is.

Contrary to the quality Index I mentioned in the paragraph above, here you can really pay attention to the industry so you can measure and compare yourself with different thresholds.

Once you got the baseline, it’s a matter of optimising the way you work so those metrics could start improving (how to reduce bottle necks, how to focus on a reduced number of tasks instead of working in several at the same time, TDD, pair programming, improvements in your testing strategy or even architecture so your products increment are delivered faster and can be developed in parallel minimising conflicts among teams…).

Third party influences

While the first four seem to be the most obvious ones, we can’t just ignore the power of positively influence people that are not strictly under your area of influence.

Every time you talk to a teammate, it’s an opportunity for you to behave as a role model. Do listen to your colleagues’ problems, even when they “do not impact your team”. You might not know, but your previous experience could help another team which is suffering a similar problem you had in the past or you even might provide feedback in an open and candid manner that would encourage others to do the same within their teams. By doing this, you are being a role model.

Additionally, getting information that is flouting around you would make you feel more connected to other teams and your organisation and very likely help you to make more impactful decisions within your own team and the products you are all building together.

And that’s it. Hope you enjoyed reading it.

I really believe Software Development is a collaborative craft. Not just when it comes to writing code itself, but mostly for solving problems and setting up strategies together. Therefore, don’t hesitate to write a comment on what you agree or even disagree… Your thoughts and ideas would help myself and the community to keep growing professionally!

And finally… if you found interesting any of the foundations above or you would just like to dig deeper, let me know and I will be pleased to share further thoughts and experiences on it.