What does it take to create a great development team that builds great products and works well together across departments?
We reached out to technical and engineering managers who have succeeded in assembling a cohesive team and asked them to share their hard-won wisdom on team building. From finding the best-fit candidates to retention tools to motivating your team, the following tips will help you achieve better results with your team.
Expanding the capabilities of your engineers
Engineering teams often find themselves at odds with management, corporate development, or marketing on projects – often because they are viewed as servants rather than like-minded business partners. To get the most out of your developers, make sure you listen to them and give them a voice in the work.
Remember your steps
Employee empowerment measures can also foster collaboration and help retain the most talented developers.
The team should be able to set their own professional roadmap and determine which technologies are best suited for specific tasks, while being held accountable for their decisions.
Watch your step Managers in tech are too often distracted from their first love: writing code. But the problems that arise when you leave out the “management” aspect of the job profile run deeper. Companies should position managers as strong technical mentors for their teams.
Provide more visibility to the business
Giving your developers more visibility into the business can also ensure that your technical teams have a better understanding of what needs to be done to achieve business goals. Some companies agree that access to the company’s core business plays an important role in providing developers with valuable insights.
Breaking Down Walls
If your projects aren’t solving problems the way they should, it may be because of barriers that need to be broken down. The director of IT at Cisco removes barriers by focusing on two areas: Culture and technology. “On the culture side, we invest energy in building relationships within the company.
Know when to train cross-functionally – and when to specialize
Redistributing roles on short notice can create a team that is better prepared to solve unexpected problems on the fly. In this case, cross-functional training can be critical to getting the most out of your team. Companies use cross-training extensively.
Mix it up
Another way to promote cohesion and break down barriers is to bring team members together with colleagues they do not normally interact with as part of their daily tasks. Instead of dividing work into regular teams, you can simply bring different teams together so they can share cross-team issues and work together to find solutions for improvement.
Moving to cross-functionality
Sometimes the best way to get more out of your development team is to split them up and put them together into cross-functional teams that combine talent from different aspects of the business. This is especially effective if you find projects that are slowing down because of communication problems between departments.
