On having team values

Great teams have a sense of purpose. Having a shared vision can drive you forward by giving you inspiration and by strengthening the bonds between your team members.

I feel lucky to work in a team where in our first ever team meeting we were able to talk a little about what we wanted from our shared work and set some team values together. Our session boiled down to three main values: Technical Excellence, Respect and Collaboration.

This is what these values mean to me and what I think makes for a dream team.

Technical Excellence

This is about having shared standards and being experts in our respective fields. The code we write should conform to modern standards and we should be able to give constructive criticism to each other about the best way of designing new things.

For my own work: I want to design infrastucture that complies with the AWS Well Architected Framework and that is as re-usable as possible. I want to avoid creating the sort of technical debt that inhibits future innovation and I want to encourage rigorous code reviews to maintain the quality of our work.

Respect

This is key to building a team that works well together and can trust each other. Respect is one the five scrum values and so should be at the heart of every scrum team.

When I work in teams it is important to me that I try and create an atmosphere where all people feel like their voices can be heard. No matter what your experience or your area of expertise you should feel welcome to contribute to discussions. I hope every team member feels comfortable calling out unacceptable behaviour in others.

Collaboration

No one person, no matter what their level of expertise, has all the answers. If you want to foster innovation you need to take time to encourage your team to be open to new ideas and sharing with others. People have different areas of specialism and so collaboration and hearing all those disparate voices is key.

A lot of the work I do is relevant not just to my team but similar teams across many departments. There’s no point re-inventing a feature every time it is needed when you can share your work instead. We have a moral duty to keep our code repositories as open as possible so that people can focus on designing and building new things instead of wasting time, money and effort on re-engineering something others already have.

My dream team