Lessons from building a kick-ass agile team

Building an agile team from the ground up involves consideration of a lot of factors. You have a huge responsibility of on-boarding the right people, aligning them with the vision of the product, building the right team culture and making sure that everyone is on the same page with respect to quality.

Every time I get an opportunity to build a new team from scratch, I am engulfed with mixed feelings. I feel excited, because I am given the rare opportunity of kick-starting a great team. But at the same time, I feel scared because somewhere deep down I am aware that one wrong decision can potentially break the team.

In the past, I have made my share of mistakes and learned how I could have avoided them. In this post, I want to share my learning with leaders who might be tasked with similar responsibility.

Below are some of the ways in which I start building a new agile team —

Creating a compelling vision of the product for the agile team

Teamwork is the ability to work together toward a common vision, the ability to direct individual accomplishments toward organizational objectives. It is the fuel that allows common people to attain uncommon results. — Andrew Carnegie

Back in the 1960’s, there was a time when IBM was losing business because the software they were building was of poor quality. To solve this, the management team brought together a group of people who were relatively better at finding bugs than their peers. They called these people “The Black Team”. Now this team had just one task — to find as many bugs as possible and to savage the developer’s code.

I know that sounds pretty villainous, but it actually turned out to be very effective.

But here’s what you should know- none of the Black team members were exceptional testers. However, they had a common vision which made them better than the average QAs. Together they were more effective because they knew if they didn’t do their tasks well, they would lose business.

This is exactly what we need in agile teams- a compelling vision and a mutual feeling of craziness to make the team win. Having a shared vision helps people understand the bigger picture and they work harder than usual to make the project a huge success. So, when you’re building a new team, it’s important that you help them understand what is it that you’ve gathered for.

Another advantage of having a compelling vision is that a good team member would always want to know why working on this product will be the best decision they ever took? They would want to know how this project is different from any other project? How does it impact the human life at large? Some team members would also be interested in knowing how working on this project can help them expand their knowledge and give an opportunity to learn new technologies.

So. there’s a good chance that you’ll onboard some kick ass people in your team because only those who have a thirst for knowledge will be interested in joining you.

Setting up the right culture in the team

Culture is what happens when the boss is not around

Culture, especially in Agile teams, plays an important role. Since Agile teams are self-organizing teams, it’s important that every team member has a common understanding of what is expected from them.

So, it’s upon the leader to set up the right examples in the team with respect to core values that matter to the organization.

For example, at Quovantis, we have five core values- excellence over mediocrity, collaboration over command and control, self-managed over directed, curiosity over complacency, and honesty over impressions. Now, to make sure that the team understands what these core values imply, they must know how to imbibe them in their work. This guidance has to come from the leader.

A few examples- how to make sure that each team member is honest in his/her deliverables and not just pretending to do ‘hard work’? How to help the team understand what is excellence and what is mediocrity? Is the code where only some unit test cases are written acceptable? How to make sure that team members are self-driven to deliver on time?

All of this must be listed down in a document and shared with the team so that they know what’s expected from them.

More importantly, a new team in the forming phase is apprehensive about a lot of things. People don’t feel comfortable in voicing their opinions and are probably holding back a lot of criticism for the process/people. What tasks should the team pick up first? What should they do if they don’t agree with some practices? How can they hold each other accountable? How should they give each other feedback?

So, it’s a leader’s job to ease out the team’s doubts and make them feel comfortable with each other.

Create a skill matrix for the team

It’s possible to fly without motors, but not without knowledge and skill. — Wilbur Wright

A new team with new team members brings an eclectic mix of people from various backgrounds. There is a possibility that they all have previously worked on some other project or probably it’s their first project.

To help them sail through the challenges of product development, it’s important that the product leader must guide them with the right skill set that they must develop. In this case, defining a role-specific skill matrix helps.

What skills are necessary? How to acquire them? Would they be required to learn a new skill in future? Is there scope for personal growth and learning?

The reason this is important is because agile teams embody “we” rather than “I”. So, it’s not just about the team member or the product’s success. Rather it’s about mutually succeeding and improving skills for the future growth.

Formulate team processes

The best teams I’ve encountered have one important thing in common- their team structure and processes cover a full range of distinct competencies necessary for success.— Jesse James Garrett

An agile team is like a child — it grows with time and becomes mature with experience. Therefore, just like in life, it’s important that every agile team has strong pillars of ethics and a disciplined approach to work. At the same time, every team member must also understand the team processes, tools, team rituals, and why they are important.

The reason for this is that when they understand how these processes fit into the scope of things at a high-level, they don’t look at it as just another activity. Rather, they look at it as an impact wielding weapon.

High-performing agile teams have a strong foundation which rest on practices like code reviews, unit test case coverage, sprint retrospectives and regular product releases. So, for a new agile team, take as much time as you want in figuring out which practices you want to follow and then make them sacrosanct.

At Quovantis, our teams ponder over the below team practices/processes-

• Which ALM (application lifecycle management) tool to use? Like JIRA, Azure DevOps etc.
• What would be the workflow through which work will be delivered and deployed?
• How will team do estimations? Which technique they will use?
• Do they need a wiki for collaboration? If yes, what kind of information will go in there?
• How deliverables be reviewed? What would be the guidelines to follow?
• What metrics team will monitor to know about progress and discover risks? Each ALM tool comes with a lot of reports and metrics that team can use for their benefit.
• Which tool they will use for internal communication? Like Skype, Slack etc. No, they all aren’t the same. Carefully choosing the one that suits group requirements will work the best.
• Which tool to use for automating unit and functional testing?
• Which tool to manage action items coming out of retrospectives or other meetings?
• How to manage DevOps? Which tools to use?

There can be many more things that go in the list above. But these is a good enough list to start with.

An agile team, no matter the years of experience, is always in the phase of learning and improving. But it’s true that it’s a bit difficult for a new team to adapt with Agile methodology. Therefore, it’s always a good approach to make a good start and reap the benefits of a highly effective and functional agile team.

I would love to know your thoughts, the tools or processes you’ve used in bringing up a new agile team. Drop in your comments and enlighten us.

I wrote this blog for our Medium Publication- Unboxing Product Management. The publication is a weekly column by people of Quovantis to share their learning.