155: Invest in Design for Long-Term Sustainability

Investing in software design for sustainable growth

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Off Topic: Steps to Foster a Successful Team Environment

Ensure every team member understands your company's business model and operating assumptions. Revisit and clarify the significance of your goals. Foster open communication, creating a safe space for concerns to be expressed. Reward performance and outcomes that matter, avoiding divisions within the team. 

Investing in the growth of support engineers is crucial. Understand their career aspirations and identify milestones for development. Assign tasks and set developmental objectives, fostering a supportive environment. Research highlights five essential factors for high-performing teams. Embrace mistakes made in good faith and seek help, as they don't diminish our worth. Safe teams foster collaborative problem-solving and continuous learning, delivering quality work within timelines.

Status should be reflected in the software. One-on-one meetings between managers and employees are valuable. Frequent check-ins allow for feedback, mentorship, relationship-building, and collaboration. Yet, relying on one-on-ones to drive progress indicates underlying dysfunction.

Create an environment encouraging healthy push-back, leading by example, and sharing honest feedback. Celebrate genuine victories, have fun, and embrace failure as a learning opportunity. Involve the team in defining success and establishing actionable metrics. Let them have a say in determining the current units of success. Trust people to self-organize when conditions are favorable. Set simple rules for team formation and changes, allowing individuals to follow their skills and energy.

Organize for adaptability, prioritizing teams that engage with the market. Enable teams to reorganize rather than resort to grand restructuring every few years. When setting OKRs, ensure they align with business goals and avoid top-down control. As a healthy system, fostering divergence and serendipity doesn't rely on a perfect hierarchy of intent. Regularly gather the team to generate or review strategy statements, focusing on what truly matters for success and identifying necessary trade-offs.

[^]: Brave New Work: Are You Ready to Reinvent Your Organization?

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