008. Structure

A sensible approach for establishing more formalized processes.

If you find that you’ve got plenty of productive teammates but your backlog doesn’t seem to be getting any smaller, congratulations! You’ve reached a critical stage in the growth of your team and you’re ready for what comes next.

Increased productivity usually coincides with the need to implement more structured processes. Structure benefits your team by clarifying and focusing work efforts, communicating expectations to management and stakeholders, and building trust between the team and its leadership. The approach this edition will recommend can apply to any process, but is particularly useful when choosing a software development workflow.

Many options for development workflows abound. The naive approach would be to read about all of them, choose the one you like best, then foist it on your team. While this approach will not certainly result in failure, it does certainly fail to take advantage of the knowledge and experience of the talented team you've built up thus far.

Structure is best implemented from the bottom-up. As a leader, it does not usually serve you well to find a box that sounds good and then try to put your team into it. Instead, think of structure like a scaffold that you build around your team, so that it supports them. Here’s how.