Working in a Balanced Team

Building technology as a balanced team allows great opportunity for each contributor to understand their product from all three perspectives of engineering, user experience/design and businesses. Trying to build out a product that suits the need of its users takes a team effort from engineers, designers and product managers. Each member gains an understanding of why certain aspects are desired, which helps drive a best fit product for the user.

It is key to have those small daily discussions around your product and users with your team. Sometimes poking my head up to ask my designer a “what-if our product did this” question turns into an hour long talk about future iterations. It keeps everyone’s mind sharp around our current products goals, and keeps our imagination running for new possibilities. It is important to learn how to effectively explain your responsibilities at a high level to members of other roles. An example would be explaining to a product manager how using a reverse proxy or key-value database may make your application faster. Knowing how in depth to go creates less friction in the conversation.

Balanced team meetings to make decisions can also be held when answers are up in the air. Since all team members are able to have rational suggestions in each role’s domain area, decisions could be produced by possibly anyone on the team. Sometimes answers need to be made by individuals with the most expertise and knowledge in that domain, and thus sometimes will have the responsibility to make the decision. Your team’s success depends on every member. When one person wins, everyone wins.