Team cultures are incredibly varied and reflect a wide range of values
and priorities. Some promote team success, and others promote team
failure on a grand scale. However, even among the cultures that lead
to successful teams, some are incredibly efficient and focus the
majority of your team’s effort on the work they set out to do, while
others provide a great deal of distraction from the task at hand. In
this chapter we’ll talk about culture, with a strong focus on various
communication techniques that contribute to success. We’ll identify
how these techniques can be used to create any product more efficiently
with a team of humans.
What Is Culture?
When you hear the word culture, your thoughts typically wander to
either an evening at the opera or the dish of jelly growing bacteria
that you had back in high school biology. It turns out that
engineering team culture isn’t all that different from the latter.
If you’ve ever had a really delicious piece of sourdough bread and took the time to hunt down the person who baked it, you would find that the key ingredient to the bread is a starter containing yeast and lactobacillus bacteria living on a diet of flour and water. The yeast is what makes the bread rise, and the bacterium is what gives the bread that amazing tangy, sour flavor. However, not all lactobacillus strains are alike, ...
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month, and much more.
