Articles for category: Team

June 18, 2024

Greg Thomas

The Check-Ins

How often do you check-in with your team? I don’t mean a sprint meeting, I mean an actual check-in? We put a lot of focus on this during the pandemic, but are you still doing it? Why not?  No time, no love for the team? If you’re not checking in with your team, how do you know how they are doing? Do you know how they are doing? You probably don’t, and if you don’t, you don’t know how they are doing and where they are going – and that’s what you’re missing out on.

Leverage the Team

If you don’t have a team, get a team. A team can be anyone, random coworkers, related coworkers, family, or whatever. But get a team. And when you don’t know the answer. You ask the team, you leverage their skills and abilities in what you are trying to accomplish. That’s what they are there for, to help and support you. So get a team.

Building the Team

Teams are about picking the right people. Not always the best, but the right. With the right people, the team can do anything. With the wrong, they will never rise above where they are. What goes into being the right people – so much, and it’s different wherever you go but at its core – they have to be willing to change, to grow, to know when to lead and when to team and lastly they have to want to be there – from there, you can teach them anything.

What Meetings Used To Be

When they were smaller, you didn’t know you were having them. When you started using chat, you didn’t realize how much faster and simpler they made your life. The first time you had a call with more than two people you marveled at how much you got done in such a short time. When you got together to discuss a topic, a point, a problem – you didn’t need to write copious notes and have follow-up apps for follow-ups, everyone knew what had to happen next and they did it. The first time you had a huge town hall and

Scaling your Development Team

Growing Teams isn’t easy. Growing development teams while having to deliver releases is an endeavor in its own category that is always met with – “I don’t want to onboard new people while I have a pile of work to get done” – which is completely understandable. We always default to scaling by people, headcount, and numbers – and yet there are other ways to scale as well – Process, Growth, Minimalism, and Skill.  I wrote about this a while ago here.