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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 30th, 2023

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  • I actually tried a daily slack bot instead. The team HATED it with a passion. And the amount of productivity lost on other teams to a backend engineer blocking a systems designer being blocked by a UX flow etc is insanely large. We have never missed a deadline, hit all our revenue targets, and get much. much larger features done in 2/3rds of the time of the next nearest team. Part of that is because we’ve made sure to reinforce the concept that we are a single team instead of a group of server engineers, backened engineers, frontend engineers, system designers, [removed to protect identity] designers, econ specialists, UX designers, UI artists, and QA working in their own bubble.


  • I mean it really depends on the team. My role is as much translator as anything else. I have:

    Infrastructure/Server

    Backend

    Frontend

    Designers (three different kinds)

    Performance/Econ specialists

    QA

    Hearing “Oh I didn’t know that, yeah we need to sync” is a common occurrence and on a team of nearly 20 people we never take more than 15mins. We have shared deadlines, shared goals, and work on shared user stories. Having that moment in the morning to go “okay, am I blocking anyone without realising it?” or “I gotta remember to make sure design knows the spreadsheet won’t have the thing they were expecting today, it’ll be Tuesday instead” is well worth the time.

    On top of that, with WFH it’s a really good way to cement the team aspect. I wouldn’t care so much if we were in the office, but all being remote means we lose the “human” behind the screen a lot.

    As I said, different teams and different projects need different things, but I’d argue the reason my team is the number one performing in the entire company is, in part, due to this morning time to get that alignment.


  • Depends on the team. My team do daily standup and it helps. A lot. “What are you working on today and do you need any help to get it done” is a super powerful question to make sure we’re all focusing on the same priorities and sharing the knowledge we have, especially in a team of mixed disciplines.