What does real teamwork feel like?

 Lately when people have asked how things are at work, I have responded enthusiastically that we are sooo agile and productive.

Then they ask what I mean by that.

How do you explain an experience that others might not have any frame of reference for, that they did not experience? When their feelings around the words I use are very different from mine? 

During the past three years I have been a member of  the "same" team. Well, only two of us have been in it all the time, others have come and gone. What we all feel who have been part of it is that we had something special. The past year we have also levelled up a notch.

The fundamental feeling, I suppose, is one of joy. We feel happy seeing each other again after the weekend and look forward to building things together.

Productivity-wise, we have been taking a product idea, brainstormed to decide what to build, broken it down into engineering tasks and released a small but well-loved feature to our customers, all within a time span of two to six weeks. 

Each one of us has brought their best forward, while respecting the contributions of the others. We win together, we lose together.

• Without the attention to customer needs and product value from the PM, and her well-balanced decision-making in the creative chaos, we would never be finished.
• Without the attention to customer needs and the UX of the product from the designer, the feature would miss its mark.
• Without the wacky out-of-the-box ideas from some, the well-grounded solid ideas from others and the discussions in between the feature might not have been as good.
• Without the engineers imagining and evaluating what is possible to build, the solution could have become too complex or unnecessarily simplistic
•  Without the manager helping to structure and focus the work, we might have got lost along the way

How did we get there? 

First, we have been lucky to have an upper management that has been available to share long-term goals and vision, while letting the team get on with their work undisturbed. No destructive incentive plans or disruptive dictates have marred our flow.

The team manager has acted as a facilitator and made sure that the team has owned the process and the team has set the weekly goals and focus. The manager has also protected the team from unnecessary turmoil and used their power to remove obstacles.

In the team, we always took the retros seriously and made sure to talk about things that needed talking about, changing things that needed changing and trying different things when we weren't sure.

We had mini-workshops to help us understand ourselves better in a team context. In one, we looked at True Colors to think about our different preferred styles of working. In another, we talked about how we talk to each other, using The Core Protocols as a basis. At an offsite, we did a session on what expectations we have of each other in the roles we have been assigned.

Above all, we trusted each other to bring what we were able any particular day. We recognized that some days you don't have that much energy and you could say so. You were allowed to be sad or tired, but also happy and possibly distracted. I think that is the true meaning of bringing your full self to work, even though there still are plenty of private details we don't know about each other.

Since we were all working remotely, we kept the daily stand-up to sync up  with each other. We planned the week, set a focus, did some backlog grooming occasionally and of course we did our retros. Otherwise we were delightfully free from anything scrum-related, our process was ours to create in whatever form we wished.

We made space for a bit of socializing as well, with random 1:1s each week and a group chill session every second week. A little wackiness, with video filters on Fridays. Ever seen a puffer fish do a product demo? 

Where do we go from here?

All things eventually must end, and so has that team in the latest restructuring of the company. We have now seen and felt great teamwork and hopefully we will be able to recreate most of it wherever we land next.

Hopefully these reflections also help inspire better teamwork elsewhere.