What you share
What you actually share
List everything the team genuinely has in common and sort it by how many of them it is true of. The shape is narrower than anybody expects.
The people this page is about, and which of them have ever worked together
- 01The team's managerEvery working pair in this grid includes this person
- 02The designer
- 03The data analyst
- 04The product managerWrites the brief everybody reads
four people · 6 possible pairs · 3 of them have worked on something together · 1 has only been in the same meeting · 2 have never done either
Four of the eight, and only the pairs that run between those four.
The things a team has in common
List everything a team genuinely shares and sort it by how many of them it is true of. The shape that comes out is usually narrower than anybody expected.
A manager is not a thing in common
Eight people sharing one manager have eight separate relationships with the same person. That is a property of each of them, not something held between any two.
Shared time is not shared work
Overlapping hours and attendance at the same meetings are necessary conditions for collaboration and are routinely mistaken for the thing itself.
The handbook nobody has read
A written team charter is a row on the pyramid with a width of zero until somebody has used it. What makes a shared document real, and what a dead one costs.
What a shared codebase actually buys
The strongest row on most technical pyramids is a shared artefact, because it creates occasions between people without anybody organising anything.
Shared vocabulary and where it comes from
Every team has words that mean something particular inside it. They are made by pairs doing work, which is why a sparse team has eight private vocabularies.
The overlap you have and the one you need
Each row on the pyramid cuts the team a different way. Lay the cuts on top of each other and the sub-groups appear without anybody having to name them.
When the only thing shared is the hour
Some teams share the administrative apparatus and nothing underneath it. The shape that produces, why it feels like something is wrong, and what it is not.