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Your Team Doesn’t Need Eleven Goalies
Recently I went on a spate of interviewing. And as always, it was interesting to see certain common trends across companies that otherwise seem very different. Most are not particularly noteworthy: a trend towards FAANG-style algorithmic interviewing, self-serve availability scheduling, conscious approach to remote work.
One new question popped up in my interviews this time through. Interviewers seemed to like my answer, but it took a long time to explain. I’m writing it down here to hopefully cut down on that explanation time (and so I’ll remember when it comes time to interview again). The question is a fairly simple one:
What’s your ideal team composition?
My answer is effectively the consequence of two beliefs about leading people:
- The autonomy/mastery/purpose model of engagement is a good one.
- People need practice to get better at most tasks.
In particular, my focus is on mastery. Autonomy will come in the day to day as I lead the team: delegating things effectively, generally treating everyone like adults, and cutting down on dumb process. Purpose will come from the company’s goals and my ability to set each person’s context within those goals. How the team is structured effects mastery far more, since the shape of the team influences how the work is distributed.
My goal is to line up the shape of the team with the shape of the work. To grow their mastery, each person needs to practice on something near the edge of their skills. They each need something challenging enough to learn from, but not so challenging as to overwhelm them.
If my team needs to make a pile of CRUD APIs, I’m not going to build a team of world class type theorists to do the work. They’ll get bored. Then they’ll leave. But someone fresh out of college, who still finds that basic sort of work a challenge? They’ll be happy to do the stuff others on the team consider drudgery. Vice versa, if my team needs to make a static analysis framework the new grad will probably be so lost that they don’t even learn much from the struggle.
In practice, there are a bunch of other things that come into play. As people grow, their challenges will need to keep up with their mastery. The work your team…
