Chapter 19. Change your mind: your product is your team
You should change your mind about what you’re building when you become a project manager or team leader (as a boss).
Forget your product. Look at your team. Suddenly, you don’t have to worry about technical decisions or pretty interfaces. You must realize that the basics of your work have changed. My own inspiration is the mantra “team equals product”:
The product will be as good as your team is.
The behavior of your team will determine the qualities of the product.
So your product as project manager is the team. Invest in the team. This will change your efforts profoundly and redirect them toward helping the team grow.
I first read that idea in the book Software for Your Head (Addison Wesley Professional, 2002), by Jim and Michelle McCarthy. This was annoying and shocking for me.
Now I believe every little effort you make to improve your team infuses the products they create. You must be ready for that. Your behavior must change to let your people do their best.
If you’ve been assigned as project manager recently, start studying again! (Take a little advice: read, and read a lot!) You have no more technology-related problems.
I love Alistair Cockburn’s comment: “If you don’t know anything about human behavior, you know very little about software development.”
So stop and think about your previous work: do you really know something about people and their behaviors? Start changing your focus from product to team, and from technology to people.
Pay attention to people, and identify the phase your team is in and what it needs in order to evolve. Find the right leadership for that phase. Admit you can’t become the one and only leader, but you can be that person who turns mediocre teams into great teams: a great manager.
If you keep thinking about building products, these will only be as good as you’re able to manage and control your team. But if you facilitate the emergence of the full potential of your team, the product will be enhanced and enriched by many people and their synergy.
Roy’s analysis
This note eloquently states one of the main points of this book. If you look back at the Team Leader Manifesto presented in chapter 1, you see ideas about focusing as much on people as on software, and understanding that great teams make great software.
Whenever we’re faced with a tough question, “What do I do now?” the guiding principle should be “What pushes my team closer to self--organization and being able to solve their own problems?”
- In survival mode, decisions are based on getting the team out of survival mode (even if that means focusing on current actions and removing over-commitment).
- In learning mode, decisions are based on what removes you and other bus factors from key points, so the team can flow in their implementation of solutions to problems and ultimately reach a pure self-organizing state.
- In self-organization mode, it’s about keeping things flowing and making sure that, if they degenerate again, you take the right steps to correct that situation.
If software is a beam of light that’s projected on a wall, then your team is the flashlight that shines that light. To change the light—its focus, its texture, its colors—work on the flashlight, not the wall, and not the beam.
Bad teams produce bad software. Even potentially good teams that handle pressure badly produce bad software. Teams that know how to handle what you throw at them, and know what to do when they don’t know what to do, are the ones that make great software. But that takes a team with the skills to do this.
JOSE RAMÓN DÍAZ (http://najaraba.blogspot.com/) has been developing software for more than 10 years, and now he shares agile principles and practices as the best way to improve organizations and teams. He’s interested in encouraging teams to become effective and efficient, while also enjoying their work.