Build team with a soul

The main responsibility of a SDM is to build teams. One has to do it multiple times under different conditions to prove their worthiness. For examples, 1. Build a new team from scratch 2. Take a deeply troubled team, turn it around 3. Take a mediocre team, give it meaning and energy, turn it into high performance team 4. Airdrop into a team with exclusive culture, earn trust and evolve it into an open minded learning organization … A lot of SDM had successful runs in one team, but couldn’t repeat their success in another team. There were many famous CEOs got hired to turn a company around. They did what they had done before that made them successful, but failed miserably in the new environments. The problem is a team is an organic system that consists of people. A management mechanism can only work within the context of the specific people, their individualities, their relationships, their shared narrative, value, meaning, conventions and norms - the culture that defines the team. I am building the No. 7 or No. 8 team for KMS. I found if you try to repeat the exact mechanism on a new team, it likely wouldn’t work. But there are some general best practices that seem to work on most high performance teams: 1. Build a story for the team’s vision that let team members feel their meaning and value in the story 2. Clearly define the team’s tenets, ownership and mission: what it owns and how to make decisions 3. Establish social norms and standards of what is good, and what is bad. Good should be promoted and bad is discouraged, promptly. 4. Have repeated routines: daily stand up, sprint planning, demo, retrospective and fun team events etc. 5. A clear software development lifecycle: PR/FAQ, design review, project milestones and dates, launch checklist and postmortem session etc. 6. A learning culture: weekly tech talks, hackathons and new hires onboarding process etc. 7. Promote fast iterations and feedback loops 8. Focus on operational excellence: working backwards from ops dashboard that measures customer experience, ops oncall and review, operational readiness review for all feature launch, relentlessly automate manual ops labor with technology innovations 9. Make everyone accountable of their own career and delivery, measure everything, celebrate their achievements … But the same mechanisms that worked on a team for a long time might not work anymore on the same team. People change based on their aging process, life experience and work-life priority. Nothing stays the same, everything is in a flux. Mechanisms should change accordingly. “There was a peasant in the land of Song who had a tree in his field. One day a hare dashed up, knocked against the tree and fell dead with its neck brocken. Then the peasant put down his hoe and waited by the tree for another hare to turn up. No more hares appeared, however, but he became the laughing-stock of the land。” — 韩非子·五蠹