Leading Biotech Data Teams

Chapter 3. Deploying Tooling

So far, the Reciprocal Development Principles have focused on high-level, more abstract ideas, namely expanding the scope of your team’s objectives and improving how you communicate and coordinate with other teams, particularly in the wet lab. In this final chapter, we’ll get a bit more practical and technical. But as you’ll see in the following, the first eight principles provide a foundation that will allow you to effectively implement the final four.

In the first chapter, you established goals around scientific impact. But for the most part, your team won’t make that impact directly—you’ll do it through your colleagues on the science side by providing tools or predictions or something else. I’m going to use the shorthand “tools” for whatever this is, even if you don’t think of it as a tool.

Building tools that the bench team can and will use is important. But the harder part is getting these users to use them effectively. That’s because the way that users interact with tools is defined by a host of factors outside the code itself: the tasks and processes that it’s used for. The habits and mental models that define how users think about their tools. The stories that these teams tell themselves, or hear from others, about the tools. I’m going to use the shorthand “processes” for all these things, even though it’s much more complex than just processes.

As a technical leader of a technical team, you’ve been trained to think about tools. The last four ...