Thinking beyond your team

Recently, couple of my teams decided to combine their codebases. It was essentially the same application, written twice over to do the UI for a wizard that went down 2 paths. Their backends do very different things. However, the customer sees a very similar interface.

After having done the migration, there have been some gripes. There is a lot of waiting between time zones. Ownership isn’t clear. Operational setup hasn’t been worked out. Perhaps the biggest issue was that there are two teams for a single codebase. It seems to trip people up when it comes to figuring things out.

So I’ve been asking this one question over and over:

Imagine the other team reported to you (or you were part of the same team). How would you solve this?

Another version of this question:

Imagine you had 15 people in your team across 2 locations. How would you run your scrum processes?

Once you remove the artificial manager/team/pod based barrier, people seem to work it out. This little mental barrier is the root of a lot of problems when collaborating. It is really important for people to identify their tribe. For most people, their tribe is their scrum team. Increasingly, that isn’t good enough to get the best results. At least in my team, we need to expand our view of what our tribe is.

The Bear and shows about teamwork

I love TV shows that show great teamwork. They aren’t always easy to find. Most shows tend to focus on an individual character and their story arc. I’ve been watching The Bear recently and it is one of those.

The Bear is about a restaurant that is in the brink of falling over. Most characters in the show are struggling with some issue in their lives: grappling with mental health issues, grieving lost loved ones, broken marriages, terrible childhoods etc. They bring the internal chaos to work and the there is no room for the individual skills to flourish. People are too busy screaming at each other to think about why they are there or really, to listen to any good ideas. There is strong push to go back to what was before. This feels a lot like many teams I’ve worked with. Maybe less dramatic.

It is interesting to see what gets them out of the rut. Some of it comes down to small changes — devising clever ways to say “sorry” when it is too intense to say it out loud (they roll their fist on the chest), calling every person a “chef” as a sign of respect, making sure the tape is cut properly etc. They have to continue to do non-ideal things to make ends meet. The individuals themselves have to go on their own personal journey in parallel. Some of it is brought on by new perspective from external events or time spent training internships. Overtime, they start to demonstrate to each other it can be done, as a team. Even things like changes in processes stop being taken as power plays or done for adversarial reasons.

Of course, their challenges get harder. Each individual have to step up their game overtime to make it work. However, the most important thing is that they learn to lean on each other. They learn to be candid, but respectful. Each challenge ties them closer together.

And they make great food. Check it out — highly recommended.

Image credit: TVDB

The other shows I loved for its team work is “Star Trek: The Next Generation”. It probably needs no introduction to many: there are so many things to like about it. I just couldn’t noticing how their team dynamics helped them get out of so many issues. “The West Wing” isn’t bad for teamwork either.