A Recipe for Team Success

Creating and sustaining successful teams is an area of significant interest in organizational behaviour research. In this article, we will address the simple ways that can be used to organize teams. Although it isn’t a formula for all types of challenges, the article will explore some merits of the method.

Brief Background

Our flagship product, AiQ is built as a microservice. Each microservice has a cross-functional team comprising of product management, development, and QA functions. Functions including visual designers, product analysts, and business insight analysts are also present in some teams.

Each team is empowered to develop, own, deploy, assess and improve the product end-to-end.

Goals of the Organization

Our organisational goals are aligned along the following broad themes.

Have fun

• Create fun groups of people
• Low fun quotient = low engagement

Innovate

• Nurture a continuously innovative culture

Scale

• Scale the number of decision makers
• Empower people to self-manage
• Build a leadership pipeline

Product quality

• Adopt best practices and tools
• QA automation
• Meet non-functional requirements before product releases

Learn and adapt

• Ensure that teams are continuously learning
• Adapt to changing customer needs and tech

Stay agile

• Maintain a healthy turnaround time from idea to production
• Gather feedback and iterate on the product

Approach

Once the goals are identified, the next step is to identify the necessary skill sets that are needed to get every team to successfully meet their goals. Skill sets include both technical skills and soft skills such as communication and teamwork.

Once the skill sets are identified, the next step is to organize the team such that the necessary skill sets are distributed across all the teams. This ensures that skill sets aren’t skewed towards a single time, and all teams can implement strategies successfully.

Skill Sets

The following table lists the key skills needed for the team to be successful in each of the axis.

Have fun

• Different types of people with different backgrounds
• Different Interests in and outside of work

Innovation

• Brimming with ideas
• Collaborative
• Itching to prototype and translate to production

Scalable

• End-End Ownership and Accountability
• Wants to guide and lead people
• Experience

Product Quality

• Interest in all aspects of software development
• QA Automation skills
• Attention to detail

Learning & Adaptive

• Exploring attitude
• Share knowledge with team
• Not fixated to a specific technology

Agility

• Effective communication skills both verbal and written
• Bias for action
• CI/CD interest

Results

Once the team skill sets were realigned, improvements were found in each of the teams across the six parameters. New members were able to utilize their unique skill sets, whether related to quality or agility while also having fun. They were also able to learn skills from existing members and improve upon their traits.

Everyone served as catalysts and mentors in taking the team forward in areas where their key strengths were.

Summary

It is important for every company to build and maintain high-performance teams. The above is just one method of structuring teams. Even when the goals and skill sets evolve, the underlying framework of identifying and matching them is a repeatable recipe for success.