Working with the Team

 

Building empathy: the experience of working day-to-day with the team is something easy to forget if you stay in leadership positions for long. Observing and triaging paging alarms, answering other teams’ questions, debugging questions from customers. Observing how the team handles them and feeling at least a part of the pain allows you to better help your organisation in the future.

Shipping to customers: Shipping is your heartbeat and it’s important to understand how the process works, how to monitor the change and what tools are available to do that, how to roll it back and recover. You learn your log search engine, observability tool, alarming tool, deployment pipeline, infra configuration or storage architecture.

Understanding the pace: Team by team you learn how fast the team ships, understand the bar and orientate yourself in what pace a team should operate under different circumstances.

Learning the process: You learn how teams work week by week. You understand how the implementation details are discussed and aligned and how engineers contribute to them. This also allows you to understand how resilient teams are, what shape of talent there is in place and what roles or skills you might need to invest more in.

Building relationships: Coming fresh, vulnerable and in learning-mode helps build stronger relationships with engineers in your org that will be useful later to get a trusted pulse from the teams, help you champion ideas or provide honest feedback.

Understanding the customer problems: by working with the team, you have opportunity to ask why multiple times and deeply understand what problems we are solving, why in that priority and how they are contributing to bigger picture of teams around you