Brian Boyer, NPR Trei Brundrett, Vox Becca Aronson, Texas Tribune Adam Schweigert, INN Lauren Rabiano, Vox
Knowing what your mission is means you have a bar against which you can measure your work. If impact is important, how do you measure impact. If our job is to make people care, a lot of decisions get bounced off that.
That mission came out of conversation with the team.
Texas Tribune mission is politics and community engagement, which drives what they build.
INN supports lots of different resources, aims to be a shared resource for them. Office hours every month. Mission came out of a conversation about how INN can suport its newsrooms.
Vox product team supports 7 websites, so mission is product-centric.
Mission statement is sort of hokey, (so NPR calls it a manifesto), but it's just a thing to hold up to say "are we doing this or not?"
Understand the ultimate goal. Have someone who's in charge of keeping everything in order and on task.
Finding personalities that complement each other, support team goal.
It's important to like each other.
Potential for individual growth.
Inaugural team retrospective. A lot of folks felt like they didn't understand their role.
"Responsibility without authority is like an apathy machine." — Brian Boyer
Teams get unhappy when they feel like they're just churning.
There's a lot of value in just the way you're organized — iterate on that too.
Are responsibilities divided in a way that makes sense?
The team is a product.
We need more structure. Sprints. Documentation. A lot of it is GitHub.
People's roles change.
Document/manifesto, making case for changes.
Work on process to shield team from having to worry about that.
Project planning meeting: Totally not transparent enough. People did not understand their destiny. Tweak: Open invite. You don't have to come if you're busy, but it's an open forum.
Training editors. Keep list of what you're doing, give clear options for priorities/costs.
They can hold weight differently inside and outside of teams.
Reporting structure is important too.
INN lets people decide what their titles are if it's important to them.
People don't want their titles to dictate what they do.
One thing that's wrapped up in titles is opportunity. Upward mobility.
Hard when there's limited budget, limited understanding of how effective the work we do is. So many people love their prose.
Hard to shift the cultural dynamic, to get people to see we can have authority on a subject and add value.
You can only move people up so far. Part of keeping people around is helping them learn.
Don't skimp on perks. Conferences, a budget, etc. Ask them what makes you most happy and try to get it for them.
If you can rig your team so no one has a shit job. But everyone does grunt work. Give people agency. We don't just take requests. Come to us with a problem, we'll help you solve it. Don't come to us with a solution.
Making happy teams is about hearing what people have to say.
30-minute meeting. List of questions that we need answers for — be direct about it. Not "so, how do you feel about this." Have a purpose and intent. Small meetings, communicated out.
Every meeting has to have an agenda. Even five minute meetings. Five minutes at the beginning is a lot better than an hour at the end.
Don't just have an agenda. Have homework (ahead of time). Literally standing meeting, leaning is not allowed.
Pushback against meetings that aren't for making decisions. Make sure only essential people are there.
Very short meeting every week with boss. Go through all the plans. Then boss can be scapegoat.
"Steering wheels". Bring up backlog of potential stuff, prioritize through lens of mission.
Analytics and evidence can help make a point.
Managers have to spend time helping team understand what's important. That's the work.
"Be vicious. A bad hire is the worst thing in the world." No false positives. If anyone says no, they're off the list.
Recruiting is a job, and only you as a manager can do it (not HR).
Dual benefit to showing your work: Other teams can benefit, you can benefit from other teams.
Slack as watercooler.
Created opportunities to meet outside of work. INN Book Club, Office Hours.
Even if your team is local, you don't socialize enough.
"Don't hire jerks."
"Consensus is the best but only works if you're roommates or a country."
Let's test it out.
Have a tiebreaker.
Culture of honest and open critique.
Anonymous surveys as starting point.
Make a clear statement about why that's valuable to the organization.
You have to make time for it.
Critique session for in-progress projects.
Shielding your team can be an excuse for not having hard conversations.