Uncovering a tech team values
What makes a team stick together? How do they see themselves? What differentiates them from other teams?
Shaping a new team is a unique experience. Watching the crazily productive and the soft speaking newbies getting to know how things work from the know-it-all-fix-it-all guy, the nicest QA engineer on Earth learning how the product works from the most energetic PO on the former East side of Berlin is priceless.
And this is how, in 5 easy steps, we found out what brings together one of my teams at Outfittery.
That person and this person
I'm a huge fan of Paulo Caroli's approach to retrospectives. I've been using it every 2 weeks for the last 5 years and I see nothing but people laughing and having fun in those meetings.
So we went for the That Guy and This Guy format (which nowadays I prefer referring to as "That person and this person", thanks a lot Emma for pointing that!) to structure and initiate the conversation about how we wanted to behave towards each other.
We gave everyone 4 post-its and asked them to think about their past experience in other teams, the things they value, the cool things they see people doing around and write down what they deemed most important for an actual team to flourish out of a group of strangers.
After 3 minutes, everyone had a chance to present their topics and hang them on a wall.
Clustering
We were 6 people. Times 4 post-it's. Odds were there would be something in common among those 24 pieces of yellow paper. And the odds didn't fail.
We identified the topics that different opinions had in common and clustered them together. Maybe what the people wrote down was different (e.g.: “That guy needs to be dragged to meetings by the rest of the team” vs "This guy is always on time for meetings") but we sticked to the underlying topic (e.g.: Punctuality).
Prioritizing
Talking about each and every post-it hanging on the wall is exhausting and counter productive, since not everything in there is important to everyone. So we used dot-voting to filter out the topics that really matter. For example, punctuality or complaining vs suggesting solutions.
Transforming into phrases
We didn't want our team values to be something no one understands. We didn't want to need a glossary page lost somewhere in our wiki to understand what those values were about. We didn't want anyone to laugh about what we some day agreed to be our team values.
We wanted them to be clear. We wanted them to be actionable. Those values had to be something that could easily be fit in a phrase, so that people in our team could say to each other "Hey, we all agreed to <value here>. I think we should stick to that agreement and just do it".
So, after clustering and prioritizing post-it's, we agreed on how to phrase those topics into actual phrases.
Make them visible to everyone
Values are worthless if you can't remember them. How can you point at people and tell them they should be doing <X> if you can't remember what's <X>?
So we've wrote down new post-it's and hanged them on our wall, in a place visible not only to ourselves but to anyone visiting our room. After all, those are what bring us together as a team, we should be proud of them. And if we're proud of something, let's make it clear to everyone how proud we are of them.
Try it out
Coming up with values for your own team is not hard. It's all about cheap stuff you can find at any corner: post-it's, pens and talk. Go on, give it a try. You and I know you want it :)
If you need help or a direction, leave a comment. I'll be more than glad to talk about it and help you figure out what to do next.
Oh, and by the way…
In case you're looking for examples, these are the values we came up with:
