The team: 10 software engineers and data scientists from 8 different countries, 5 are women (including me). Diversity is so much more though, and my goal is to build a culture where diversity and inclusion is just as much about preferences in work style and communication.

All technical decisions are made by the team, not me. When the team delivers, it's my job to make sure the team is recognized and gets the credit deserved. When things go wrong, that is on me. I take responsibility, and we learn from our mistakes and attempt to do better.

The team has adopted a mindset of privacy and compliance being guardrails to help us avoid making mistakes. It's not something for us to 'overcome', it's an integrated part in everything we do. We've made great friends with our compliance & privacy champs, involving them always.

WFH, the team has found new ways of working together. Every day, someone will start a Teams meeting where those who want join. Everyone is muted with cameras off. If someone has a question, they can simply unmute and raise their voice, like we did when we were a desk apart.

This often leads to team programming, where you share your screen and the team looks at the code together, discussing implementation details or debugging together. This has resulted in the team having a very good understanding not only of their own work, but also everyone else's.

For larger design decisions, they have started scheduling Code Design Reviews where one dev proposes an implementation approach to collect feedback. This is a great documentation for all major design decisions made, and is something we can share with other teams to learn from.

The team has always delivered well, but they have suffered from high workloads and lack of work/life balance. I've put focus on guarding your personal time, fixing service reliability issues to avoid night-time calls, and having conversations about mental & physical health.

I try my best to understand every team members goals and aspirations, so that I can identify work which will lead them in the direction they'd like to go. This is probably my most challenging, but also most fulfilling, task as a manager.

We of course have areas of improvement. We're still working to break down silos in the team, can't seem to make sprint planning work properly, struggling with downstream dependencies impacting our availability and much more.

Let me know if there are specific topics you're interested to hear more about, and I can elaborate. I'd also like to learn from all of you, what is important to your team and how do you go about improving? Which books/resources have you used to improve as a manager/team?

@karolikl Thanks for sharing! 👍 Want to try out that "open plan office teams meeting" thing :)

@arewold We call them "open spaces". It's definitely reduces the feeling of isolation and increases collaboration, let me know how it goes!

@karolikl Very insightful, thanks for sharing! 🙌