Building a Technology Team

Over the last few years, every one of my jobs has started off by by building a technology team. I will spend this post putting my ideas together on how to build a strong, effective, and motivated team.

A strong technology team always starts with a strong, positive motivated leader. The person needs to be empathetic to rest of team members. He should have enough technical and management experience to guide his team towards the goal (produce quality software predictably). Also, he needs to have enough business acumen to seek out projects which make substantial impact to the company's bottom line. This last point is especially true for startups, there are always so many good ideas that people feel like trying, but resources are always finite also. Good programmers are used to working alone, and tend to communicate less than they need to. Excellent communication needs to be facilitated by the team leader - through design meetings, brainstorming sessions, postmortems etc.

Each individual team member is very key to the overall success of the team. For me building a team is to make it fully self sufficient for the project/ product they are involved in. This means having strong project management, analytical, design, coding, testing, and maintenance skill sets to be readily available in the team talent pool.

At the same time, good personality fit is also very key to making the team successful. Extreme personalities do not work well together. For example, people who are very shy should not be placed within a team of very outspoken people, the shy person will not be able to speak up - and hence will be ignored.

In my experience, it is very important to have work pace flexibility. Individuals have different work pace levels, and if this aspect is managed correctly, over time - this leads to very high overall productivity.

Team building activities (other than work), are also a key part of the team dynamic. Having team members to depend on each other in a fun challenging activity leads to reduced work space tensions. Often, having a person backup strategy helps to formulate strong relationships within the team.

Sense of accomplishment as a team has to be recognized and fostered as well. This leads to positive reinforcement and increased competition within teams and works well in a positive work environment.

It is always important to take regular checks and balances to find out what is working and what is not. Despite everybody's best efforts, sometimes there is need to take some hard decisions and change team composition if things are not optimal.