Why great teams can’t be copied
Most managers try to recreate a great team by copying its practices. Here is why that fails, and what to focus on instead.
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Most engineering managers carry around a ghost team. It is the team they worked on five or ten years ago where everything clicked: no ego, blameless retros, decisions made in ten minutes that would now take three meetings. They have spent every job since trying to get back there. And every time, it does not quite work.
The reason has nothing to do with the new people being worse, or the company being too big. It is that the kanban board, the lack of standups, the open Slack channels were outputs of trust, not inputs. Copy the outputs onto a team that has not earned the tru…
