Dynamic Reteaming, 2nd Edition

Preface

Expertcity was about to die! Conceived as the eBay for tech support, this startup that my colleagues and I poured our hearts and souls into had failed in the marketplace. By 2001 our leadership team said it was time to stop all development. I cried.

Fortunately, our cofounder Klaus Schauser had a plan. His plan involved a pivot that would ultimately lead us to breathtaking success with two best-selling products. To get there, we needed to begin with what I now call dynamic reteaming.

Klaus asked me to join a small, isolated team to work on a brand-new product. Because we reteamed, we were a new team and were able to work differently. We could innovate. We were given explicit permission and encouragement to abandon the Waterfall way of working that we had grown accustomed to. We had process freedom. It was liberating.

The team was comprised of software engineers. I was along as a writer. We didn’t have any other roles, unlike other teams at our company, who were told to leave us alone. Not having the standard roles meant that we had to do it all. Developers designed the interface and didn’t have to wait for pixel-perfect mock-ups illustrating the frontend design. We named the product Easy Remote Control—or ERC for short. Those initials would live on in the codebase for years. The product was later named GoToMyPC after a company contest was held.

If we had not reteamed at that time and had gone down a different path, I think we would have never created these successful products— ...