Things I keep in mind when making a group of individuals an effective team.

Lots of face time in the beginning

This is easier in-office than it is remote. As teams are starting out it can really smooth out a lot of edges if teammembers get to know each other a little bit.

Regular team meetings (with camera’s on if remote) and cliche ice-breaker questions are fairly effective tools here. I also nudge engineers to do coffee chats when I have 1:1s with them or to do a quick zoom call for pairing.

Transparency

I’ve found that working in a way where I can communicate with the whole team at once (slack channel or project tracker) put everyone on equal footing. It also made sure that I was communicating the same thing to the whole team at once.

Me working in public like this also inspired engineers to do the same and suddenly we are coordinating as a team instead of disjointed conversations hidden in DMs.

Trust and ownership

I like to work with people who want to grow (a controversial opinion, I know). It’s top of mind for me to give people the opportunity to take on more responsibility and I keep track of who has been project lead lately, making sure that everyone gets an opportunity to step up if they want.

I don’t trust blindly though, I will give ownership but I would be following along via status updates and be available for guidance as people require.

No solo projects

To avoid the bus factor and to avoid “only H can touch this piece of the codebase” one of my guidelines is to avoid solo projects. This doesn’t mean that everyone needs a buddy for every single task. It means that if a project is spanning more than a couple of weeks, we should have a group of engineers working on the project so we have a group of engineers who can maintain the project.

Make engineers invested in seeing their teammates succeed

You can force this via the career ladder; You can only be promoted to level IV if you have helped 3 engineers grow to level II.

I find that if you get teammembers to know each other, and you show everyone on the team that you are invested in their career growth, teammembers will adopt your mindset and start rooting for other peoples success.