General Guidelines for Productive Teams

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These are some general-purpose guidelines for team interaction that aim to facilitate maximizing development production, balancing bureaucratic needs, and minimizing unnecessary interruptions for everyone.

  1. One team sync meeting per week just before each client meeting in order to group all regular disruptions into a single block of time

  2. Try hard not to have meetings. Use async comms and informational tools such as Slack and Trello over face-to-face discussions. This isn't always possible, but if it is, this is preferred. If a meeting is not necessary, don't have one.

  3. Communicate with team members to solve problems. Often times they can be solved asynchronously and don't require meeting in real-time. Team members should discuss the necessity of having a meeting and agree to it together. Just because something fits in one person's schedule, doesn't mean it fits in another person's.

  4. If someone needs to meet in real-time, ask first. Maybe the issue can be resolved async. But all members of a meeting need to be aware of it, and agree to it, for it to be successful. Don't just assume the other person is able to drop what they're doing and re-focus on your challenge.

  5. If a meeting needs to be rescheduled, again, ask first. Just because something fits in one person's schedule, doesn't mean it fits in another's.

  6. If someone has a problem, challenge, or question, talk to other team members before making decisions which affect the whole team. Often times there may be alternative solutions which may not be immediately obvious. The more we can share what we're working on with each other, the better we can each understand each others' challenges and help one-another meet them.

  7. This is a team: a group of different people working together. No one member dictates how all the other members work. We work together to find the best way to accomplish our goals, which will necessarily be different in different contexts. We should be able to tolerate these differences in approach or understanding or working style or values and align on common goals.