A set of recurring conversations

How easy our role as managers would be if we could install leadership skills in our brains the same way we install a new piece of software on our computer.

Exactly six years ago I was handed one of the most important challenges of my professional life: building a team from scratch.

I had managed teams before, but I had never had to build one from the ground up. It has been an enriching and extraordinary experience. I have been lucky enough to work with great people.

Of course I have made mistakes. I’m not going to sell you the idea that I’m an extraordinary boss, or that we have no conflicts. But I think we have done very good work together.

Last year I presented my experience with my team in my talk at StartechConf 2013; the video of that talk is included at the end of this post for those who haven’t had the chance to watch it.

One of the ideas I laid out in that talk is the definition of a team as a set of recurring conversations, an idea I adopted from my current boss.

The photo above shows part of our team solving a problem. I have used this image in several talks to express this idea of a team as a set of recurring conversations.

Our role as developers is to sustain a permanent dialogue among ourselves and with our users. How are we supposed to meet their expectations if we don’t understand this idea?

Over these six years this has been one of the guidelines that allowed us to consolidate an innovative, successful team that I’m proud of.

Let me share some facts that aren’t explicit in my talk and that put the work we do in perspective.

We are a group of thirteen people, divided into two units of six people each. Each unit is led by a woman. There is gender parity on our team, something I consider important for having an innovative team, as I have said on another occasion.

Over these six years we have developed more than thirty services. We work with four outside companies that support us in developing new projects. The team itself handles development, maintenance, quality control and support for most of the services we have online.

Right now this team, with the support of the outside companies, is running nine development projects, of which four are new services and five are new versions of existing services. On top of that there is a large number of maintenance tickets for the existing services.

Last year this small team did more than sixty production deployments. This year we’re at ninety-one!

In our JIRA we log every support, development and maintenance ticket; this year more than 1,600 tickets have been created and 1,460 have been resolved to date.

Despite such a heavy workload, staff turnover has been zero for two years now. Even though we have a lot of work and pressure, the work climate is, in general, good.

How do we do it? I’ll tell you about that in an upcoming post.

For now I just want to leave you with the idea that gives this post its title: think of your team as a set of recurring conversations, reflect on that idea and see what impact it has on your performance.