The A Team

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The A Team

I work in Arkency for almost 4 years and lately I’ve started to think how it influences me. Working together is not only about delivering some good as a bunch of people - team has own identity, own culture. These days I decided to write down what I found out about my team for two reasons. First is just to see some day how it evolved over years - but that’s a good reason to write it in “My sweet diary”, holden under a pillow. I’m also inspired by great blog series “We are principled” by 8th Light.

I find team culture as a mix of team members common goals and values, which are mainly focused on good they produce, but also how they see the future, their career etc. So here’s what I found out about my team:

Goals:

  1. Produce good for the customer - nothing to say, it’s a common goal for all companies.

  2. Hacker-friendly job - we all are more or less nerds. We want to play with code, we want new challenges, we want to automate things.

  3. Educate - great hackers share their knowledge and discuss about ideas. And we want to be great hackers.

  4. Remoteness - work wherever you are and whenever you want.

Values:

  • Collective code ownership - each line of code is owned by whole team, so when bug shows up it’s whole team’s problem, not author of latest commit or author of given line.

  • Don’t repeat mistakes - learn from them, test against them.

  • Reliability - customer can depend on you: your skills and your commitment.

  • Anarchy - organizational loose coupling.

  • Respect - you listen carefully to people you respect.

  • Business orientation - always keep in mind what problem do you solve for your customer and your customer’s users - where the money come from or where can we save them. Know the large picture of project and it’s scale.

So what?

What can I get from this set of goals and rules? It’s kind of model of this small world – team’s physics. So like in all other models - it simplicize reality, but helps to understand what’s going on. Knowing current state you can also try to shape it into something different. It can also help you when you try to hire someone.

So here’s question to you, kind reader: how is your team?

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