My experience with Re-organising a team
After Forto secured the $240M funding round led by Softbank and took its valuation to $1.2B, we were set for the next hyper-growth phase to make shipping products as easy as sending emails. We started hiring engineers, managers and directors to help us make it true.
Forto was set for the next hyper-growth phase after securing $240M funding round led by Softbank and took its valuation to $1.2B. We started hiring engineers, managers and directors to help us make it true.
My stream-aligned team had taken a lot of ownership of different domains along the way. It was getting hard for everyone to engage and help others when blocked. Team meetings were longer and sometimes without concrete actions. Some engineers had expertise in the sub-domain compared to other team members.
Besides, our business needs were changing from a startup to a scale-up. Changing business needs made it certain that we need to re-identify the team’s purpose.
I have shared an abstract of my execution here. I am skipping the part of understanding of different types of teams, their collaboration types and finding a right split. There are lots of great reference on the internet on it already.
There are many scenarios where you would like to re-organise the team and below are 2 examples of them
- Reorganising a big team: The team is big that it is hard for everyone to know what their team members are working on. High cognitive load, frequent context switches, high dependency, long meetings, slow on boardings
- Prepare for future business needs: Teams needs to refocus and prepare themselves for future business needs. What brought them here, will not bring them to the next level. Re-identifying the team will enable them for future success.
Reorganising the team in 1st case is relatively easy. Team members have chosen their challenges and teammates. Leaders need to observe and acknowledge the existence and identity of smaller teams. The reorganisation should not bring an impact on planned deliveries or team bondings. Instead, it will improve deliveries and engagement.
But, the 2nd case requires everyone in the team to understand the purpose. It is not easy to give up the purpose that motivated everyone to come for work every day together. The team might need to go through the gelling with new teammates and deliveries might be slower.
My team was phasing through the intersection of both of them.
Action plan
- Collaborate with Product team: I partnered with the product team and onboarded them on the idea of setting up the right teams for future success. They helped me to learn the product vision and discovered future opportunities and areas with long and short term visibility.
- Create awareness in the team: I started providing context and learning everyone’s opinions in our 1on1s. I asked them “how will you organise the team if someone asks you to do?” The question helped me reveal new ideas, their preferences, cut my biases.
- Gauge team’s understanding of the purpose: Everyone in the team must understand that “Why reorganising is the need of the business" and “How it will enable them to reach their objectives". I run an exercise with the team on Miro to bring a common understanding of the purpose of re-organisation. Below is a snippet of the outcome of the exercise.
- Identify the success parameters: The team has to decide what they want to achieve. Team together came up below areas to optimise with the re-organisation.
- Execution: I took the outputs of 1- 4 actions above as the driver functions and create a proposal of the new focus areas with the engineers knowing their competency, growth trajectory, domain understanding and future opportunities. I tried to keep the relationship of engineers intact and keep them closer to the area of their interest but there is no the right setup. I drafted a concrete execution plan with milestones and dates.
- Share with the team and be ready to roll back: I shared a concrete proposal and execution plan with readiness to alter or rollback.
- Collect feedback: After sharing the proposal plan, I schedule 1on1 with all my team members to collect their feedback in the following 2 days.
- Schedule a team event to celebrate the good old times: Many times re-organisations are followed by negative events. It is significant to celebrate good old times to acknowledge everyone’s contributions.
My learnings
- It is for them and not for you: Re-organising should help everyone to perform their job better. By making the team part of the process and running exercises helped to remove my biases and understand what the team cares for.
- Do not overthink: There is no the only right way to make the split. Propose, execute, gather feedback and be open to change.
- Do not over organisation: I over-organised the team. I made 3 teams out of 1 team with future hiring plans for each team. All teams have to go through onboarding new engineers and re-identifying their purpose and values. I could have avoided this by either having 2 teams at the start and staffing at least one team with adequate engineers without any hiring needs. The article staying on path to high performing teams resonates with my learnings.
- Building a team takes more time than you expect: I underestimated the time and energy needed to hire and build a team. Teams need to go through bursts of the gelling process with new joiners. The gelling process affected deliveries and engagements.
Some references on team organisation
