What Makes A Great Team?

A reflection on the qualities of strong engineering teams.

I fell into people management completely by accident. Working as a senior engineer, I was promoted into a tech lead role, which at the company I was at included line management responsibilities of a small group of engineers. That was six years ago, and I have been working with teams in engineering leadership roles ever since.

In the role I quickly discovered that I genuinely enjoyed working with people - something that as an introvert who spent the majority of his life trying to avoid other people was somewhat of a revelation. I like to think I have always been self-aware and introspective, and this translated to a skill that helped me build connections with other individuals. I enjoy thinking about the psychology of a group of people bought together to create and solve problems and collaborating on making that group as effective as possible.

Through my time I have worked with a variety of teams - some building household name products, to some working in 'stealth mode', and I believe I have developed a decent understanding of what makes a team 'great' through direct exposure.

Sure, there is the obvious, technical ability and decent communication and collaboration skills are core foundations - but there are a few other characteristics that I believe are more important to signalling whether a team is a strong one or not.

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A great team is fully autonomous

As a manager, I strongly believe a big portion of success from your role means that you ultimately make yourself redundant in a team setting. The team should not have to rely on any one individual within it, if it does, it is not a strong team.

Everyone within a team should have a level of ownership that they are happy to step in and play someone else's role in their absence if necessary. They should be afforded and trusted to take this ownership by leadership as well. If someone takes holiday, the team should continue running as smoothly as if that person was there. That means having people who are happy to facilitate any meetings/rituals when needed. It means having engineers who are in tune with the product goals of the team, who are happy to think about the product requirements and solve problems without being told specifically what and how to do it, and who are close to the customers & end-users. It means not having one super star engineer who has to have the final say in anything that goes out the door.

Unfortunately, I see a lot of managers creating a moat for themselves, introducing complex rituals and process' that people have no motivation to follow. Sure, it makes that individual a value to the company/team because things cannot run without them there, but to me good leadership is about inspiring other people to take lead when necessary by having them truly believe in the value of any process' they are following. Great leadership/management is about empowering people through thoughtful delegation and a culture of trust, not disempowering people by taking on all of the responsibility yourself.

One of the strongest teams I had worked with had gone through a time when they didn't have a manager, and in that time they had built up their own ways of working and had organically developed process' that suited them. I joined a team that was already running, and was already self-organising. Were their ways of working textbook? No, not at all. But it matters very little if they are truly bought in to the process, and there process for getting shit done was simple, efficient and effective - and they all knew how to run it. They had got there by iterating over time, and finding the simplest way of working that enabled them to be productive.

As a manager, it should be your focus to remove any single point of failure from a team (within reason - obviously there are always going to be cases where one persons work cannot be replicated) and that includes yourself.

A great team constantly seeks to improve without blame

I have been part of teams and cultures unfortunately where the company culture was to rule by fear and blame. In one example a VP of Product told the team their efforts were "shit" and to essentially try harder. There are very few people in life that are motivated by being berated and what I saw first hand was the fallout from that thirty second tirade was the damage it did to the engineers over the long term.

In contrast, the company I joined after that had some of the best leadership I have ever seen. We had regular all-hands meetings, were things that didn't go well were discussed, and the CEO would frame these as learning opportunities. Everyone in the room was responsible for doing better, even him, and it made everyone step up to the plate. As a leader, you need to take responsibility for things that have not gone well in the team, and seek to do better.

A team is never perfect. They will have times when they work more efficiently or have better outcomes than other times. This is because there are so many variables at play, and success depends entirely on the teams attitude towards success and their attitude towards failure.

Celebrate success, and take learnings from it.

Celebrate failure, and take learnings from it.

In the team that was told off for delivering something not perceived up to scratch, engineers were less willing to take risks, less motivated to do great work and more than likely to look for somewhere else to work where they felt more valued.

Group ownership of a short-coming helps people to feel more motivated to solve the problem and do better next time.

A great team is truly inclusive

I was given an anecdote once by a junior engineer about one of her colleagues, a staff engineer. Her story was that when they were working together, the team had voted on and decided to forgo stand-ups on certain days to value focused time. Being neurodivergent, this was a big disruptor to the juniors daily schedule that they relied on, and they found this premise hard to cope with. Without prompting the staff engineer offered to spend the 30 minutes of reclaimed time doing a standup for just the two of them, to help walk through the tasks and provide her with the structure she was relying on for her day.

This selfless nature, and helping someone has the benefit in the short term, but it has a long-term effect of making everyone in the team feel 'valued' and psychologically safe. Of course, it would be easy for one of the most senior engineers who is able to have the most impact across the tech stack to consider they have more important things to be focusing on, but that is what carries even more weight. It is a strong indication that people are the most valuable asset of a company (which they are). I think we often under-estimate that compounding effect of genuinely just being kind to each other makes - and that goes right from people just starting their careers right up to the C-suite. It also is a way of celebrating, but also advocating for peoples differences. Everyone has their own strengths and weaknesses, and we should be ok with that and understand how to utilise each others strengths.

In the same company, I joined the infrastructure team with minimal infrastructure knowledge, and we quickly found that my lack of deep context for the problems they were solving was useful. As we were building for other teams in the company that also had limited knowledge was useful as it helped distill otherwise complex topics into a digestible and easy to understand format. The team spotted that, and celebrated that my different technical background that on the surface seemed like a weakness, was a benefit.

Having everyone on the team feel valued and part of the team means that everyone is more likely to bring their whole selves to work, to give back and to take risk. Great things happen when people at a company feel genuinely valued for being there.

A great team knows what their version of success looks like

From what I have experienced often this is a singular or reachable goal. Have we done X this quarter? Yes? Then we have succeeded.

An achievable goal is beneficial as it helps people to choose and prioritise effectively and efficiently. If something comes up and it detracts from the teams goal, they can say no or at least question the reasoning. This again comes back to ownership, and individuals in a team will find it hard to take ownership of anything when they don't know what it is they actually own in the first place.

In my opinion, small teams that focus on one specific area are set up for success much better than teams that are larger in size and spread across multiple work streams or multiple goals. That is not gospel by any means, but this is based on my experience so far.

Again, my experience is the simpler the goal setting framework the better. Whether it is using a specific (and it must be meaningful) metric to track success, or just agreeing that X feature should be delivered by Y, this is is key that everyone on the team knows about it, understands it, and can make important decisions based around whether work they are doing helps the team towards that goal.

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To summarise, a team can be a great team even if it doesn't hit all of these requirements. Finding or building a team that successfully does all of these is likely a bit of a unicorn.

Great is subjective - and each team I have worked with have had their own strengths and weaknesses that make them unique just like individual people. This is the joy (and the challenge) in working with people, no two individuals or teams for that matter are ever going to be the same. And that is ok <3