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Not Yet a Team All fifty notes

What you share

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.

The people this page is about, and which of them have ever worked together

010203020304
  1. 01The team's managerEvery working pair in this grid includes this person
  2. 02The designer
  3. 03The data analyst
  4. 04The product managerWrites the brief everybody reads
Have worked on something togetherHave only been in the same meetingHave never done either

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.

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Method

Where projects cross several roles, teams can view the feature summary to make hours and handoffs visible enough for a useful capacity discussion.

The broader organisational question can also be checked against resources from Entrepreneur.

What these eight actually have in common, by how much of the team it is true of

What they have in commonHow much of the teamCount

The same manager

8 of 8

The only thing true of all eight, and the reason they appear in one box

The same company all-hands

8 of 8

Attendance is not shared work

Any work at all in the last quarter with another member

7 of 8

Everybody except the engineer who joined in March

A working day that overlaps by three hours or more

5 of 8

The same codebase

4 of 8

Two engineers, the analyst and the QA engineer

A recurring meeting other than the all-hands

3 of 8

The same product area

3 of 8

Having met in person, ever

2 of 8

The two who sat in one office before this team existed

Any such work with somebody other than the manager

2 of 8

The two engineers, and nobody else

People this is true ofThe rest of the team

nine things · the team is eight people · the widest is shared by eight, the narrowest by two · two of the nine are true of all of them

Two further lines were given to this panel and are not drawn. One claims more people than the team has, which cannot be true of anything. The other is true of nobody, and a bar of no width reads as a bar that went missing rather than as a nought.

Make a list of everything your team has in common. Not what you would like it to have: what it demonstrably does, as of this week. Then put the number of people each thing is true of beside it, and sort.

The panel above is that exercise done for the team counted on this site. Two things are true of all eight. Everything else narrows, and the last two rows are true of two people.

Why sorting it matters

The unsorted list looks like a team. Manager, all-hands, working hours, codebase, product area, a recurring meeting, some history. Nine things in common is a lot of things in common.

Sorted by reach, the list stops being a description of a team and becomes a description of several overlapping groups. The top of the pyramid is administrative: the things that are true of all eight are the things that put them in a box in the first place. Below that, each row divides the team differently, and by the fourth row no two rows cut it the same way.

The useful question is not how many things are on the list. It is where the list stops being about everybody and starts being about a subset, and on most teams that happens within three rows.

What belongs on the list

Anything checkable. The test is whether two people who disagreed about a row could settle it by looking at something.

  • Shared tools and artefacts. The codebase, the repository, the document everybody edits, the dashboard everybody reads. These are strong rows because they produce work between people whether anybody intended it or not.
  • Shared time. How many of them have a working day that overlaps by enough to have an unscheduled conversation. This row does more work than it looks and has its own note.
  • Shared consumers. Who the output goes to. Two people serving the same customer have a reason to coordinate that no ritual can manufacture.
  • Shared obligations. On-call, a rota, a recurring duty, a deadline that lands on more than one person.
  • Shared history. Who has worked together before, who was here when the team was made, who has ever been in a room with whom.
  • And the rows taken from the pair count: how many have worked with anybody, and how many have worked with anybody other than the manager. Those two are the bridge between this exercise and the rest of the site, and they are usually the narrowest rows on the pyramid.

What does not belong

Values, in the sense of the list on the careers page. Everybody shares them by declaration and nobody can check a row.

Aspirations. A thing the team intends to have in common is a plan, not a row. Putting it on the pyramid at its hoped-for width is the fastest way to make the whole picture useless.

Attendance at anything. This is the row most people want to include and it is specifically excluded, for the reason given in its own note: being in a room is not a thing held in common in any sense that produces work. The all-hands row is on the panel above as a demonstration — it is true of all eight and it buys nothing.

Reading the shape

Three patterns come up.

A wide top and a narrow everything-else is the ordinary case. The team shares the administrative apparatus and little else. This is what a reporting group looks like and it is informative rather than alarming.

A pyramid with a step in the middle — several rows at eight, several at four, nothing between — usually means two sub-groups, and the rows at four will name them. It is worth checking against the pair grid, which will show the same split.

A pyramid where the bottom rows are the only ones that matter is the interesting case: everything true of all eight is administrative, and everything that produces work is true of two or three. That team's real unit is the sub-group, and the box is overhead.

Doing it with the team rather than for them

The list is better made in a room than at a desk, for one reason: half the rows will be contested, and the contest is the useful part.

Somebody proposes that the team shares a product area. Two people immediately say they do not. The row is not four or eight but three, and three people have just found out something about the shape of the team that nobody would have written down alone.

Twenty minutes, one person writing, everybody allowed to argue about the widths. The output is a pyramid and the by-product is the first honest conversation many teams have had about what they actually have in common, which is worth more than the drawing.

The row to add next quarter

Having done it once, the most useful thing is not to add rows but to watch one: the number of people who have worked with somebody other than the manager. On this team it is two.

It is the narrowest row on the panel, it does not move on its own, and every deliberate thing in the last part of this site is aimed at it.

Also on whether this is a team