Agile Software teams often work closely together and the communication lines between the team members are open and of high bandwidth. For team members new to Agile, they can often find this daunting because they aren’t used to the level of scrutiny and transparency from their peers. If team members previously worked independently or in different teams, when they come together as a new team, they may find that their individual ways of working may not fit with the team norm.

There will often be a period where the team has to iron out their differences before they can start working harmoniously together. As discussed in Chapter 5, Bootstrap Teams with Liftoffs, liftoffs can help teams get off to a good start, but eventually, teams will begin to go through a “storming” phase with different degrees of conflict occurring as teams try to reach a consensus on how to work together.

The first part of this chapter looks at how to help the teams to navigate conflict so that they can move through the storming phase and start to normalize their working practices. Part of this normalization process is recognizing that the diversity among team members will ultimately result in more innovative and robust solutions. Teams that can navigate to this place will often move through a plateau of performance to much higher levels as they start to create new ways of working together and benefit from the subsequent systemic change.

Finally, we look at the similarities between technology teams and sports teams in the sense that just like sports teams, technology teams have to practice their game. To do this, we use team events such as Hackathons and Innovation Days, which allow teams to learn essential techniques such as rapid validation and end-to-end experimentation.

The following topics will be covered in this chapter:

• How to create high-performing teams
• The stages of team formation and how to manage them
• Learning and practicing
  •  Hackathons
  • Innovation Days