Repeating Team Goals

Ever since reading Turn the Ship Around by David Marquet, I have always been a big advocate for pushing authority to where the information is. However, one of the pre-requisites of this is for the team to have context and understand what the goal is. Normally, I tend to think that I do a decent job at this, until recently when I dropped the ball.

The Pushback

It started in a recent refinement session I was running with the team. I won't go into details on the work but suffice to say that for some of the stories, I was suggesting we go down a simpler route which didn't require any backend work. This would allow us to complete the work much quicker. Granted, it wouldn't be configurable and easy to change, but it helped us reach our goal from our stakeholder, which was to get the work done as smartly and quickly as possible, so if we could identify any thing, we could do to reduce them time, while still writing quality code, we should go for it.

In the session, I got some pushback from some team members saying that we should create API's and not go down the suggested path. I couldn't understand why there was so much pushback and discussion. We needed to get the work out quickly and efficiently and doing that would take so much longer.

I chatted to one of the developers afterwards to understand why the push back, and he was honest in saying that he didn't understand why I was suggesting going down that route at all. At that moment, it suddenly dawned on me that they were missing some important context.

Reinforcing Goals

Backtracking a few weeks, I remember telling the team at a standup around the new goal and direction we had for the project. However, in retrospect, some of them missed the message. It happens to all of us, me included. You zone out for just a few minutes and an important piece of information zooms right on by.

What this experience has taught me is that for any essential information, such as goals and direction, it is worth re-iterating them multiple times, in multiple mediums. For example, you could send variations of the message in Teams/Slack or via email and then also communicate them in sessions where everyone is present. Lastly, you could also document them in Confluence and send the link to the team.

I know it may sound repetitive and people may have heard it already, but rather that than having the team be missing some context and landing up in an unproductive meeting, or even worse, going down an incorrect path which could waste valuable time. Overall, it will only make things a lot easier down the line.

Until next time...keep learning!