Dynamic Reteaming by Heidi Helfand

Author:Heidi Helfand
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: O'Reilly Media
Published: 2020-06-18T00:00:00+00:00

Switching for Personal Growth and Learning

It’s nice when people aren’t stuck in one team forever and when we view people with a growth mindset as opposed to a fixed one.9 We can learn and grow and change in our lives. It’s more engaging when we are learning and interacting with different people.

At Jama Software in Portland, Oregon, where at the writing of this book they had around 35 engineers, Cristian Fuentes, an engineering manager, has seen the company grow from about 9 people to 140 people. Cristian told me about how their team members self-select onto different teams depending on work needs and personal interests. People have the opportunity to leave the team they are on now and switch to a different team that matches what they want to learn. He said, “If a team member has been working on an API-type of project […] and they want to learn frontend, for example, they move to one of the teams working on frontend-type features for their own career growth.” When you find the right fit, and you are enjoying your team, you might not change teams. In his words, “Right now we’re at a point where there’s certain teams or team members that have really enjoyed working together—so they stuck together. There are other team members that still move around teams.”10

At AppFolio, we were organized with feature teams that could really work on any part of our property management application. We had a few more specialized teams when I was there, one that built and maintained the data centers that housed our software, a handful of other teams that focused on noncustomer visible infrastructure projects for customers and others in the engineering team, and a tech support team. I worked with all of these teams throughout the years in an agile coaching capacity.

From time to time, engineers would rotate in and out of infrastructure teams. One engineer told me that working in those teams, as opposed to feature teams, provided different, larger, more systemic problems to solve. And, the product managers were other engineers. That was very motivating to him.

People in our tech support team would leave their team and go work on feature teams from time to time. There, they would gain specialized knowledge of the features they would support when they returned back to their tech support team. There was at least one instance where a tech support engineer left their team and then stayed over in a feature team. It’s nice that the company was flexible to allow for this personal growth and choice.

Enabling switching can be considered a strategic advantage. Mike Boufford, CTO at Greenhouse, views it as a “secret weapon.” When people have been working somewhere for a while, they might just get the itch for change. So when you rotate them to a different team “their itch has been scratched.” He said, “I actually think it’s like a secret weapon in retention to give people the opportunity to move between teams and change their environment a bit.

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