2017 - Handling Teams in Fast-growing Companies
I decided to join a more challenging position. I was one of the responsibility to deal with multiple teams of developers in a very fast-growing workplace at EBANX.
Growing too fast
When a team or a company grows too fast, it gets really hard to grow orderly. Keeping up with a plan, or with a given organization gets harder because more and more variables are being added to the equation on the daily basis.
In these situations, I end up sticking with principles, that help me and my team to reorganize from time to time as needed.
Being an example
One of the things I didn't avoid doing was doing the wet work to show people how things could have done in a better way.
Sometimes, it is hard to go to a new team, with their own environment and changes things. So to build trust, I used to work with each developer and then start gaining respect as they notice I was able to point out problematic things + solutions to solve them.
Proper delegation
In a fast-growing workplace, new responsibilities will emerge, and someone will have to take care of them. As a lead, we should try at least to deep understand what will be required to attend new responsibilities properly before we can think about delegating it to other.
I used to have a list of the team's responsibilities, so we would have people assigned to them, and no duty would be lost in the middle the day.
Career development
One of the reasons people work in fast-growing workplaces is the array of challenges they will face, as well as the possibility to grow professionally faster, at the same time the company grows faster.
Given that, career development and feedback were essential to calm down people and let them know they are being taken care of.
I talked to them about the strong points, as well as their weak ones. What the team is in most need of, and how they could help the team even more.
A growth path would also be done. We would set priorities on what skills, both technical and non-technical should be learned or mastered first, in other for them to become a more complete professional and better help the team.
Root-cause
One of the other things I wanted to address was how we would solve teamwork problems once for all.
For example, we used to have communication problems because only part of the team would know about a given requirement, technical problems being caused by tied deadlines and not being addressed later, and so many others.
For each one of those major, and recurring problems, we as a team, together, come up with a team dynamic so we would avoid the same problems from happening again.
Wrapping up
While managing multiple teams in a fast-growing company, you need to be smart. You should come up with both solutions for the short term but also implement long term solutions and team dynamics to prevent the same problem from happening again.
You need to make sure people are feeling they are being taken care of because you can easily only take care of the development and not about those behind it.
Regards,
Renan de Azevedo
Updated at 2020/06/26 12:53.