The Engineering Leader

Section 4 Summary

Congratulations! You’re now responsible for team facilitation...but, actually, that was always true. Hopefully you now have some new tools and ideas to support you in this.

A good team has clear and coherent communication; this is a product of psychological safety, as is the ability to treat failure as a learning opportunity. They have a good idea of what can be done and how; this makes them able to ship regularly and predictably. They understand why things should be done—and why they shouldn’t, so decisions either get made or are escalated appropriately. They have aligned incentives and strong feedback cycles, which allows developing of individuals within the team, creating growth and opportunity.

In Chapter 11, “Mission and Strategy”, we talked about what makes for an effective team mission and how to develop a strategy that connects to it. We talked about why these things are important and used case studies to illustrate what that looks like in practice.

In Chapter 12, “Tactics and Execution”, we talked about the layers of team functioning, focusing on the tactics and execution layers, which are table stakes for team effectiveness. We looked at how to connect those to the mission and strategy levels, how to create adoption of process, and how to debug team execution. We used case studies to illustrate what that looks like in practice.

In Chapter 13, “Driving Improvement”, we talked about the four powerful questions that can be used to unlock team improvement: ...