What is your process when managing teams of different skills and experience?

[carolinaknoll]

Hey there! 👋 This is my first question, I didn't know AMA existed inside GitHub (but know the process inside Reddit, haha), so please do ask for more details if anything needs more info before you are able to answer. 😄

I see from your profile that you are a Chief Tech Officer, and I'm impressed you are able to understand and give guidance on projects of many different areas (web, mobile and games). That is awesome! 🚀 👏 😄

As you are involved in different teams, where some projects might be web-related, some mobile, some games, and the team might include people with a diversity of hard skills, soft skills, experience in programming, experience in that specific project or tech stack, would you say you follow any specific process, or recognize some kind of pattern on the projects that help you comprehend the health of the project, including the deliveries and team members, which helps you manage all of these teams?

I ask this because I am also just starting to take a role which involves these aspects myself, and I notice that when we start purposefully looking at these aspects, there are many things we can take on from how people act and describe stuff on the dailies, how they are asking questions (or not) and the overall delivery pacing of the project.

I'm sorry if this just looks like a long and boring interview question 😅 this is not my intention! It's just that this space is open and it's nice to know how it works. Please answer whenever and however short or long you'd like.

Thanks a lot! 🚀

[obahareth]

Hey @carolinaknoll,

My most important bit of advice is to have regular 1:1s with those teammates where you get to know them and their strengths, and where they'd like to be at. Try assigning different kinds of tasks to them to see where they shine, and have different members pair with each other. You'll start to notice patterns in how they work and communicate.

You'll have some members who are great at writing readable code, others who can produce code with amazing performance, creative problem solvers, great communicators, documenters, and so on.

I like to experiment with team setups and have more dynamic than static teams, forming teams based on the skillsets and passion of the team members themselves and how well they vibe together.

Give them the space to shine and room to be creative and you'll see where they're best at. Managing creative folks is often done by giving the room to do their own thing and offering direction/shared goals, the occasional guidance here and there.

As always, the best way to see how you're doing is to ask the team.

Since you're asking these questions, I think you're already on the right track and will be fine.