On Teams
A team is not a person.
A team is a loosely coupled system, while a person is a tightly coupled one. In modern teams, high specialization often creates dependencies, forming a “super person” where members can’t replace each other. This structure undermines agility and flexibility.
Avoid building teams around “rock stars.” While skill differences will exist, everyone should feel equally valued.
Leadership and management are different things.
Both leadership and management are essential but serve distinct purposes.
| Leader | Manager |
|---|---|
| Takes responsibility. | Exercises authority to tell people what to do. |
| Find new paths. | Optimizes existing processes. |
| Enrolls. Following is voluntary. | Conscripts. Following is compulsory. |
| Builds tribes. | Runs tribes. |
| Takes chances/risks. | Ensures delivery on spec. |
| Accepts failure. | Trace success. |
| Goals and strategies. | Tactics and processes. |
| Pursues excellence. | Maintains Quality Assurance. |
Lean means wrong.
With a Lean approach you are willing to make things the wrong way to figure out the best way. Lean embraces making mistakes early to discover better solutions — this is the heart of innovation. Failing early and cheaply allows teams to learn quickly and iterate effectively. To foster innovation, encourage fast, low-cost failures and overcome the aversion to risk ingrained by traditional education.
The point of failing early is to find out the wrong ways at little cost. When iterating, obtaining feedback quickly will speed the iteration process. With fast failure we can try more things increasing our odds to finding a success.
Hire for attitudes. Train for skills.
Invest in people’s potential, not just their current skills. Build up teams. Raise your rockstars internally, do not hire them. Hiring solely for existing skills shows little long-term commitment and often leads to higher turnover and lower engagement.
Developer traits for success.
A generalist will be better than a specialist. The developer should be able to succeed without you.
- Empathy: Advocates for users by understanding their needs.
- Analytical Thinking: Breaks down complex problems.
- Vision: Identifies impactful ideas and simplifies them.
- Scientific Approach: Solves problems systematically.
- Creativity: Generates new ideas constantly and asynchronously.
- Professionalism: Focuses on long-term value and maintainability of their work.
- Entrepreneurial Mindset: Ends failing projects early before over-investing in them.
- Curiosity: Continuously learns, practices, and shares.
- Knows some coding. Coding is the easiest skill to teach; prioritize these traits instead.
Decisions are not outcomes.
A good decision is not necessarily one with a good outcome. Outcomes and decisions are unrelated. Odds are that good decisions lead to good outcomes. But great outcomes don’t necessarily come from good decisions. We must learn to make good decisions. The sunk costs fallacy prevent us from making good decisions (valuing the old you more than the current or future you).
Choices are not decisions.
Choices are decisions that don’t matter. Don’t waste your time making decisions about things that don’t matter.
A wise team is a good team.
| Good team | Bad team |
|---|---|
| Diversity of opinion: Each person should have private information even if it is just an eccentric interpretation of the known facts. This ensures variance in approach, thought process and private information. | Homogeneity: Limits creativity and insight. |
| Independence: People’s opinions are not determined by the opinions of those around them. | Imitation: Where choices are visible and made in sequence, an “information cascade” can form in which only the first few decision makers gain anything by contemplating the choices available; once past decisions have become sufficiently informative, it pays for later decision makers to simply copy those around them. This can lead to fragile outcomes. |
| Decentralization: People are able to specialize and draw on local knowledge. | Centralization: Reduces team agility. |
| Aggregation: Some mechanism exists for turning private judgements into a collective decision. | Emotionality: Emotional factors, such as a feeling of belonging, can lead to peer pressure, herd instinct, and in extreme cases collective hysteria. |
| Bottom up: Teams work best when they choose for themselves what to work on and what information they need. | Top-Down Control: Limits innovation and flexibility. |
Diversity is a double edge sword. Diversity can introduce communication challenges - be aware and address them.
Just enough drama, like in the army.
In a team not all should be bliss, as it creates weak people and unprepared people. In a team not all should be drama, as it traumatizes and burns people. A healthy dose of manageable challenges builds resilience and strengthens team bonds. The military exemplifies this balance, using controlled stress to build cohesive, high-performing units.
No matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else.
Another good reason to build a team based on attitudes rather than in skills. Competing for skills is a loss game, and even when getting them the integrity of the team is not guaranteed (and more than likely compromised).
In any dispute the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the issues at stake.
Spaces vs tabs, anyone?
Individual members of a group will become increasingly less productive as the size of their group increases.
The communications cost or the handshake problem. See the Generalized Metcalfe’s law.
Good teams are small.
A team must be small. Small means having nowhere to hide. If I can get away with not focusing, not trying or not caring. the team is not small. Smaller teams are faster. Faster means taking less time to answer a question (Is this feature possible? Are we able to build it? Will customers pay for it?, Can it handle 1 million visits each day? Which design achieves a higher conversion rate? Why does adding a feature take so long? etc.). Not all big teams are bad, but successful big teams started as successful small ones.
Higher expectations lead to an increase in performance, or low expectations lead to a decrease in performance.
Expectations can become self-fulfilling prophecies. If you expect a student to get A’s, there is a good chance they will get As, and if you only expect a student to pass, they will do the minimum amount of work just to pass. Aka the Pygmalion effect.
People under time pressure don’t think faster.
Lister’s Law
Families that play together stay together.
Dr. Ann Barbour
Remember this for your teams forming. It is difficult to keep a cohesive team remotely. Hire for attitudes, train for skills, as the former will be more important for team cohesion and the later can be easily learnt.
Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Great men are almost always bad men.
Last updated: 20 February 2025