A team evolves every time someone leaves or joins. While I’ve gained experience adapting to existing team dynamics, building a team from scratch was a new challenge for me when I started in my current role as Product Lead. What a joy it has been! Let me share my experience with you.
My Starting Point
Summer 2021 the Corona pandemic was still in full swing. My employer had been chosen to distribute the COVID-19 vaccines from manufacturers like Moderna and J&J, which put the company on the spotlight and the healthcare specific systems received a higher focus. The “Verticals” Area was created as a response, with me as the Product Lead. Fully motivated I start in the new position with the responsibility for two systems that were specially developed for Healthcare Logistics. One was a completely external development aiming at replacing an old application, and the latter was also an application in maintenance mode with no team to take care of it, despite having a long list of unfulfilled requirements. So, my starting point was: one system well taken care of, and another one with a lot of requirements and a lot of relevance but no team.
Three years have passed, and I am halfway of building a whole internal “Verticals Team” distributed between Hamburg and Porto. It has been quite a ride, but a very exciting one. While I am still not done (still recruiting for one position), I am making good progress. In the next lines I am going to briefly share the journey until today, and the lessons I’ve learned on the way.
First big challenge: moving forward a very relevant system, without any development capacity.
After getting to know my Stakeholders, I proceeded to get a clearer picture of the unfulfilled requirements and where the biggest pains were. My goal was to also get clarity on the priorities, to start thinking of possible solutions.
During Q4 2021, I developed a new product vision with my main Stakeholder, which I used to create a Business Case for a new application and for building a small internal team to develop it, as there was no capacity. I found myself doing a lot of lobbying with stakeholders and networking.
As a result, by the beginning of 2022, I managed to get some help of an innovation center within the company to get an initial version of the new application while I recruited my first internal positions (1 requirements engineer and 2 “full-stack-devops”) in Hamburg.
After successful hiring and onboarding, my first small internal team took over the new application. It went live in September 2022, and it was a huge success with the users. Soon after, stakeholders decided they wanted to scale business scope, so in 2023 we should grow. Unfortunately, due to company-wide hiring measures, it was not possible.
Lesson Learned: It’s very important to have a good network, that can help you, especially when the team is so small.
Next big challenge: internalizing an externally developed application.
Around the same time that we were struggling to get a further developer position approved for one system, the decision was taken to internalize the development of the other, as part of a major move to reduce costs of externals within IT. Initially I was looking at both challenges from separate perspectives, until my mentor gave me the idea of taking a more holistic approach and start talking about a “Verticals Team”. This was an opportunity to balance the development capacity of both systems since they had almost the same stakeholders and were sharing the Healthcare business context.
So, I finished 2023 with a solid business case for an internal “Verticals Team” with dedicated capacity for both systems, but also some shared resources to help move the whole area forward. It was approved, 2024 would be the year of the transition.
Lesson Learned: Seek for guidance, share your struggles with colleagues (especially more experienced than you) and have an open ear for ideas. Maybe you’ll get the impulse you needed to move on.
Building the “Verticals Team”: bringing a vision to life
New teams are built from scratch mostly to takeover systems developed by others, or to start systems on a greenfield. My case was a little bit of both, as we needed to have a handover from the external team for one system, and re-architect the other one in order to scale sustainably. It was time to create a “Verticals Team” with a vision and a mission that could encompass both systems and the value they add to overarching business goals. It was an exciting task, for the following reasons:
It was an opportunity to create a motivated team to tackle challenges in an area with a high value contribution to the Global company strategic Roadmap. We improve customer experience by providing a tailor-made solution for the specific requirements of the Healthcare Vertical.
With one system we had already developed a special closeness to our users, which we could extend for the other and make it a standard for the whole Verticals Area. Currently, with this good connection with our users, we can clearly see the value of the work we do. It’s very fulfilling to find this sense of purpose at work.
Now, as exciting as it was putting a strategy together for the Area, it also posed the following important challenges:
Building a whole new team in Porto, onboarding new colleagues step by step while offboarding externals. Creating and executing a phased transition plan for internalizing the externally developed system.
Finding synergies and possible touchpoints between both systems. So far, they were evolving totally independent from each other.
Bringing people together, building a common sense of purpose and team spirit across distributed locations.
Verticals Team Kickoff: an important Milestone!
Flash forward to July 2024. 4 out of the target of 8 new internal colleagues have already started to work with us in Porto, so I organized a “Team Kickoff” workshop in the Porto office bringing everyone together. Stakeholders from Switzerland and the whole Hamburg team spent a week there together with the locals. What a great experience it was!
My main goal with this workshop was to build a trust base, a starting point for everyone involved to work well together in the future. Considering our distributed nature, in my vision this goal could be achieved by doing the following:
Meet in person, get to know each other. Have fun together. Build camaraderie and a team spirit by living some good moments together and having multiple chances to engage in conversations.
Know about the Verticals Area strategical goals, our common purpose. Clarify from the beginning roles and responsibilities to align expectations. Define how we want to work together in the future, in terms of collaboration.
Make sure everyone knows about both systems: what are they about, status quo and challenges ahead. Find possible synergies and explore if/how they could profit from each other.
Reflect together about the whole experience and decide on future action items for the Verticals team.
According to the feedback I received from all colleagues, and my own impressions, the goal of the Workshop was fully achieved.
Special thanks to the Porto Tech Hub organization
It’s been a great experience working hand in hand with the Porto Hub colleagues. Especially thanks to the Engineering Managers for the good work building this team with me. We are very well aligned and in a constant exchange of ideas to help the team deliver value and support the new colleagues the best we can. Kudos to the whole Hub organization for building such a great working environment. You are all doing a great job, you can be proud 😊
What’s next?
We are still not done with the Team Building, but as of today (end of July 2024) we are missing only 2 positions out of the planned 8 in Porto. I am sure we will manage to find the missing colleagues soon, as we have some candidates in the pipeline already. We are still working on the development roadmaps of both systems separately, but after the Kickoff Workshop, we are establishing common meetings to exchange and keep each other updated regularly. The idea is that at some point in the future, we will be able to share capacity between both systems more and more. I am really excited about the upcoming years.
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