Patterns on the most effective teams I’ve worked on: - high degree of trust and emotional safety between team members. The team can safely share feedback and risk sharing our crazy ideas - high degree of care for the craft. We hold each other accountable to quality - ships, regularly, to real customers - little status seeking - goes with emotional safety - few individuals on the team need to be “in charge” or hold ar…
Rot sets in when: - teams no longer have a real customer, such as “big rewrites” that will ship in 3 years - teams accept low quality and slack off. One PR isn’t called out and that gives a permission structure for lower quality - a bad egg gets on the team the wrecks the feelings of emotional safety. The brilliant narcissist the company feels they need to let his/her abusiveness slide - we throw new hires “into the…
- Bureaucrats cannot code, therefore they needlessly churn around and associate themselves with other people's creations. People objecting get called territorial and lose the political battle to the mediocrity.
As you see, it all depends on the exact circumstances. Sometimes your points are correct, sometimes mine.