Important Minds of Leading Team (1/2)

It passed 1 year since I become Engineering Manager(including Tech Lead responsibility in our case) in my team and 2 years since I joined in LINE.

Honestly after I become a manager, I’ve not changed the minds to work dramatically from when I was working as a developer. but what I’m doing is pretty changed.

All the time after I started to touch the IT tech(maybe from 8 years ago), I have an ideal team I want to work for.

That’s why after I’ve become a manager, I tried to make such an ideal team.
But I was not so sure, How to create such a team. when i just become a manager, even the image of ideal team was not clear enough for me to create such a team maybe, at least I couldn’t verbalize clearly.

So I tried several things, tried to think team/product/organization in several way in this year, and recently I started to feel there are several important common minds under all of my attempts, challenges to make an ideal team.

I didn’t verbalize these before, but this time to improve myself, look back myself again, I will try to verbalize 4 points I always pay attention to when direct the team.

Premise 1: Responsibility of Team Lead

First of All, Let me define responsibility of Team Lead first.

Obviously Team Lead’s ultimate responsibility is to make a good big impact against Company as a team.

This is too abstract expression, so usually each company, team have one lower broke down responsibility definition

This is really depending on the team structure, that’s why before you read this article, understanding definition of responsibility Team Lead have in this article may help you get more point from article.

Here is responsibility of Team Lead I’m thinking

1. Make sure each Project succeeded
2. Help all members perform 100% skill
3. Planning New Activity, Project to Improve XXX (=Leading Team)

Team Lead need to do any thing to achieve 3 responsibilities.

But I believe №3 “Planning New Activity, Project” is kind of “Directing Team” and others are more like supporting members get on the path which is prepared by “Directing Team”.

That’s why I would say №3’s responsibility is most important. So in this article I focus on that part.

Premise 2: Max Capacity of Team Output come from Problem Definition

This is the thing I believe is true, and all of my points came from this premise.
On this premise, I’m gonna verbalize the points “How I can expand our possibility, improve our performance” from next section. Beforehand Let me explain this theory first.

This is pretty simple theory.

Usually We have multiple project on going. Each Project have objective to solve something problem, and after Project got finished, we’ve improved Team/Product/Customer Experience…something to be evaluated by your Stakeholders (sometimes could be customer, sometimes could be your colleagues, manager)

All project’s beginning point is “Problem Setting (Definition)” and this came from your Product/Team situation understanding.

That’s why range/quality/wideness of “Problem Settings (Definition)” skill in your team (or your Team Lead) is directly affected to “Max Capacity of your team output”

For example, If you have 1000 members in your team but if you define just 2 simple problems, you can not improve your team/product very well. This is the reason I called range/quality/wideness of “Problem Settings (Definition)” skill as “Max Capacity of your team output”

So in this case, How we can increase “Max Capacity of your team output”?
All we have to do is “Expand problem definition box as big as possible” in bellow diagram.

So that’s why I have several minds I kept paying attention while I’m working in the team. So let me introduce these.

Mind1: Understand How Team/Product Works

• This is kind of preparation part for №2 (Define/Show Problem). To define good problem, the leader should understand How Team/Product works as correct as possible
• Saying “Understanding Team, Product” is pretty easy and too abstract expression, that’s why I describe 2 things I’m doing in my head bellow

1. Straighten the flow of work and the characters to help me understand whole picture of my work
2. Collect the fact & Map the fact to the flow or the character to help me find the point we can improve

• If you don’t have clear understanding about Product/Team, It’s difficult to define the correct problem, that’s why Team Lead should keep thinking how we/our product works

Mind2: Define / Show Problem in Product/Team

• 1st mind (Understand Product/Team) is really important but that is just subset of this mind (Define Problem). If we didn’t define the problem after understand Product/Team, that person would be just “critic” or “observer” who is not Team Lead (even not Team Member I would like to say)
• Problem Definition should be always based on the fact which is outcome of 1st mind like following
• Finding Problem is not easy as you imagine. If you have many experience on your area, it would be much more difficult since you have many experienced based “prejudice” against the bunch of fact unknowingly.

• This time, we should keep paying attention so that the problem will not be just complaint, and the problem should be clear enough to consider direction of solution
• I’m thinking “Why the problem is happened” as a part of “problem definition”, that’s why I also try to consider “Why the problem is happened” as well

Mind3: Direct the solution against the problem

• After we made a clear what is the problem, Next thing Lead need to do is to show/organize the direction of solution.
• The reason why I described “organize” in addition to “show” is that this activity don’t have to be completed by just Lead, that’s why I put “organize” as well here
• Usually there are multiple direction “how we will solve the problem” as bellow

• But which solution we will choose is really important here. after we listed up the solution, we should also consider “what’s disadvantage/cost/other problem this solution would bring”. Don’t say/think “it’s usual, common cost to solve that problem”
• For example, above diagram show you 2 different solutions, 1st solution “create document” approach require extra human resource (cost) and strict policy would make development speed slow down, that’s why I want to chose 2nd solution which is about “developing mechanism to automatically generate relationship map”, although this is just example I just came up

Mind4: Don’t stick to your current responsibility

So far, I focused on following area, how we will set/define the problem and how we understand product/team situation. Having these minds will increase our max capacity of team output obviously

But there is other area/way I didn’t mention but help us increase the max capacity of team output. In the first place, expanding your team responsibility to other area as well.

But here, How to expand is really important. If we expand in wrong way, we may get bad consequence.

That’s why when we expand responsibility, we should make sure 2 things

1. Having responsibility of new thing (target software/activity) is working in good way from Company perspective.

For example, If the area you try to expand is already took cared by someone and they are doing great already, you should not take that responsibility. of course you can collaborate with them though.

2. Existing Responsibility is not affected in bad way at all

For example, after you owned new responsibility, if your current product quality is going bad, that decision is not improving your team performance at all.

But here I want to emphasize is “Don’t stick to your responsibility, all the time think how we can multiply your team performance X times bigger by looking at other area which is not your responsibility” and if you think that’s good idea, just expand. That is what I’ve kept paying attention

Summary

In this article, I focused on “Directing Team” part and explained 4 points I keep paying attention to

• Mind1: Understand How Team/Product Works
• Mind2: Define / Show Problem in Product/Team
• Mind3: Direct the solution against the problem
• Mind4: Don’t stick to your current responsibility

Actually these points are not the things Only Lead should know, if all the member could pay attention to them, I believe that team’s performance would be dramatically improved.

That’s why Lead also should make an effort to help all member pay attention to them easily, for example, straightening document, creating opportunity to look back, creating project to collect/show us exact data how our product works and so on, that is the things I should pay more attention to and work on next year.

If you find interesting in this article, next article of this series would be also interesting to you, please check it out: Important Minds of Leading Team (2/2)