What is a team

9 min read

The term team is a confusing one and we should do better clarifying what we mean when we use it. In the book Team Topologies [1, p. 32] they explicitly define it as:

In this book, “team” has a very specific meaning. By team, we mean a stable grouping of five to nine people who work toward a shared goal as a unit. We consider the team to be the smallest entity of delivery within the organization.

The Cambridge Dictionary definition says something like “a number of people who do something together as a group”. Other definitions include “to achieve their goal”. These definitions work also for company or organisation, as well as for team. And we easily use the term for a group that “does the work” and we also use it for a “senior leadership team”. In fact, one of the best sellers on team performance, The five dysfunctions of a team [2], is about a leadership team. Why don’t we talk about “a team of Team Leaders” or a “team of Engineering Managers”?

In Team of Teams [3] General McChrystal describes how a military organisation became more adaptive, using the term team without defining it. In Superteams [4] Khoi Tu uses the term team to describe groups and organisations as disparate as Pixar (a company), the Red Cross (an NGO), a Ryder Cup team (a team of golf players), SAS (a military unit), the Northern Ireland peace process participants, Ferrari F1 and The Rolling Stones. Team is a flexible term.

Groups of people

There are many possible compositions for groups of people doing something together. Talking about sports, we understand a basketball team, an American football team and a judo team will work in different ways. Some sports require all participants working together like in basketball, others require specialised teams like defence and attack in American football and in other sports participants work in isolation or in turns, and then they sum their score, like in judo or bowling. Even in sport, team has different meanings.

Research on team performance has shown that the team construct is not always the best solution to solve problems [5, Ch. 2]. The same author, social psychologist Richard Hackman, identified the optimal conditions for an effective team [6, Pt. II]:

• Create a real team
• Set a compelling direction
• Provide an enabling structure
• Establish supportive context
• Arrange for expert coaching

The same author also identifies different types of collaboration that could fall into a wide definition of team [5, Ch. 2]:

• Community of interest
• Community of practice
• Emergent collaboration
• Coacting group (work in parallel, but do not have collective accountability)
• Distributed team
• Project team and task force
• Semi-permanent work team

The agile literature has made prevalent other concepts like high-performance teams, the Tuckman model of group formation [7] (the forming, storming, norming, performing, adjourning litany), and stable teams, even though now there are voices questioning some of the ideas [8].

Self-organisation is another widespread concept. Hackman talks about four levels of self-management [6, Ch. 2]: manager-led, self-managing, self-designing and self-governing. The 2020 Scrum guide [9, p. 5] has changed “self-organizing” to “self-managing”. According to the Scrum guide revision history, they mean self-organizing for “choosing who and how to do work” while self-managing for “choosing who, how, and what to work on”. Other authors include other aspects for self-managed, like managing their budget, scheduling or rewards [10]. The concept of self-management is also an essential part of Teal Organisations [11, p. 61] and aligned with Empowered Product Teams [12].

Software teams

In many software organisation, a team is a group of people organised together to achieve a mission. These groups are formed in a way to be as autonomous as possible, with all the required skills. They prefer not to have highly specialised teams that are dedicated to perform just specific parts of missions, like a front end team, a documentation team or a testing team, because they could easily become a bottleneck. So these organisations combine together people with different skills: programming, analysis, interaction design, documentation, machine learning, etc.

Some companies call these teams product teams. A similar construct is defined in Team Topologies [1] with the name stream aligned teams. In The Connected Company [13] they prefer the name pods.

In some organisations teams also have a product manager, someone who is dedicated to ensuring that the team is working on the most valuable thing. Finally, teams also have a team leader.

Leading what?

The team leader is a people manager for some of the engineers in the team, usually excluding specialisations like UX or Data Science, and also excluding the product manager. Supposedly, the Team Leader leads a team. Then, what is the team?

We have a Team Leader who is managing a group of people who are part of a group, along with other people who are managed by people outside that group. Sometimes they refer to the people managed by the team leader as the team, and other times they refer to the whole group contributing to the mission as the team. However, sometimes they use expressions like “the team and the product manager” excluding the latter from the team. Wouldn’t it be great for them to have a sense of belonging generated from the language used for all the contributors to the mission?

Do groups of people need someone leading them? It seems they hold this belief.

First Team

Can we belong to more than one team? We can belong to more than one group of people, that’s for sure. We may be part of our reading club, our sports club, the neighbours, the hospital volunteers, the Fridays partygoers and our church, and all of these can be different groups without causing issues.

In Spotify [14], they also explored the possibility of belonging to multiple groups that they represented with chapters and guilds and, as they wanted to refine the meaning of team, they decided to use the term squad. There are also communities of practice and book clubs. We do belong to multiple groups.

Example 1: Shelly, a software engineer in team PrioratWine in Barcelona, and is interested in Domain Driven Design may belong to the following “teams”:

• PrioratWine Team
• DDD community of practice
• Meetup organisers
• Runners club

Example 2: Alex, Team Leader in the same team, may belong to:

• PrioratWine Team
• Facilitators community of practice
• Board gamers
• The team of Team Leaders in his area

They have a sense of belonging to different groups, there may be multiple overlaps. It seems reasonable that multiple Team Leaders and Engineering Managers can work together to pursue a common goal. That would be a team.

If you can belong to multiple teams it is very important to clarify which one is your first team.

Toni Tassani — 28 March 2022

This article was originally published on 15 February 2021 on the company intranet.