Everyone wants their team to run like a well-oiled machine—it gets the job done and doesn’t get too noisy. But people aren’t machines that you can stick a battery in and switch on.
In an earlier post, we looked at four qualities that make for a cohesive team that can deliver well-oiled-machine-quality results. Today, we’re adding four more factors to that list.
Community
In a community, there’s a sense of trust that only time and shared experiences can establish. That’s why we work on cultivating community within our team by organizing events like barbecues, game nights, and volunteering projects with Habitat for Humanity. Sharing moments of humor, creativity, and charity fosters an environment wherein our people care about their colleagues and the work they do, which means that they’re willing to go above and beyond for each other when the going gets tough. And that kind of care shows up in the quality of the work.
Collaboration
Problems happen over the course of prototyping and designing and testing. That’s just the nature of the product development beast. At Treetown Tech, any one of our engineers may be called upon to help problem-solve, even if they’re not assigned to that product’s team. That’s just the nature of our beast.
Collaboration is all about being open to changes and ideas for improvement, as well as a willingness to share solutions. Here, no one ever gets trapped alone with a problem, which means the clients never have to wait long for a solution. We built out our space to maximize areas for our team to collaborate, not only with one another, but also with our clients.
Expertise
When a problem arises during a product’s development, we know that somewhere under our roof is a brain that knows how to solve this problem. And because we’ve established a collaborative environment, we know that the expert with the answer will be happy to contribute.
Having instant access to so many expert perspectives is how we’re able to iterate prototypes so rapidly. When a solution is needed, we know that someone in our ranks has the perspective to ask the right question or point to the next solution.
Hunger
Product development is a learning experience from start to finish. Having a hunger to learn why something didn’t work and what the solution is drives our engineers to help each other break past the roadblocks that pop up during the development process.
Having a natural curiosity and desire to solve problems and build better is key to this kind of work. Without it, we probably wouldn’t be in this line of business at all.
Time Saved, Quality Intact
Building a cross-functional product development team doesn’t happen overnight. You can’t just throw a group of experts in a room and expect them to create a perfect solution in one try. It takes a community of experts who have spent years collaborating and sharing their expertise to create the right environment for rapid problem-solving.
People aren’t machines. But with the right factors in place, you can assemble a team that runs just like one. No batteries required. Just barbecue.