Development Team Not Performing? 5 Fixes That Actually Work

0:00 Hey there, I'm Max. I've been building software in Teams for 15 years. If your dev team is not performing, they're missing deadlines, or just not clicking with you, you may you're not alone. I've seen it happen many times before. What you need to do is don't panic. Don't micromanage your team and don't write your entire codebase at 2 in the morning all over again. Trust me, I have been there. In this video, I'm going to share with you five things that I've actually learned on how to improve your team's performance and actionable things that you could do to start delivering a shipping software. Stay tuned. Tip number one, zoom out before you zoom in. Ask yourself and ask your team, what are you building? Are you building the

0:45 right thing? Are you building something that's valuable? Does the team know what they're building and what they're bringing to the table? These are big questions you should be asking yourself and your team. If the team is not aligned to the company vision, if it's not aligned to why they're building or who they're building for, then it's just not going to work. Once I had a team miss sprint after sprint after sprint and they were not delivering. It turns out it wasn't a team. They they were a great team. They worked well together. they had all of the necessary skills to ship a product. But what really happened in in the background without some of us noticing was that the product owner was changing the scope and the vision of the product almost every sprint. Every month he was trying to pivot a product that

1:31 wasn't shipped and that's no way to build a product. So before you start blaming individuals or the team themselves for what they're building actually zoom out and look if the team is aligned with the company vision with the goals and they understand what the product is they understand what they are shipping. Tip number two look at the system and not the symptoms. This means look at how people are working. Do you have the right task management product? they have the right um canon board is the team clear on what they're going on what they're building and what each individual needs to do. Sometimes more often than not individuals in in a team have no clear

2:18 idea what they need to be working on or what the delivery and acceptance criteria is for what they're doing. So it's the system. How are they getting task on what to do? How are they envisioning the overall goal of the sprint or the release you're working on? If those systems are not in place, then it's going to be very hard for for the team to execute. Tip number three, one-on- ones are better than standups. I like standups. I like having a team together. I like having them uh work together towards a common goal. But we also need to have one-on ones which each individual in the team see what's blocking them. How can they do their job better? How can you help them do their

3:04 job better? More often than not, you'll find a lot of information in in those 101 ones. And overall fixing those small things individually will just help the overall team immediately start performing better. Tip number four, deliver small wins fast. Sometimes morale of the team, it tanks when progress feels invisible. When neither the team or stakeholders know what's going on or they're not shipping something, they may be working on very long tasks, but nothing's being shipped. But if you break down those big tasks, those big features into smaller wins, smaller tasks that are visible, that are shipped and that can be celebrated, everybody in the team wins. the developers, the designers, they will be

3:50 happy because they're shipping and they're seeing progress and so will the stakeholders. So instead of working for weeks or months in a huge feature that's not getting shipped and everybody's getting worried why progress is not being made, break it down. Break it down into small ones into small features that can be shipped daily or weekly that'll improve the morale of your team immensely. Tip number five, upgrade your team or environment. Sometimes you got to face it. Sometimes you don't have the right person on board or you need somebody with stronger leadership skills or somebody who's a little bit more senior like an entire team of junior developers. They may struggle with each other. But if there's leadership or somebody they can count on for advice or progress, then sometimes you need that.

4:38 Sometimes you even have to find somebody who's been chronically underperforming. Um, and then you may need to replace somebody from your team. Remember, when you have somebody who's underperforming, as I just said, and they're constantly bringing down the team, that affects morale as well. But if you have a team that works well together and they're become overachievers between them, they're constantly one uping each other. And that means shipping faster, shipping better, a happier team with a great morale. To wrap it up, when your team is not performing, focus on improving processes, on improving team morale, unlocking what needs to be fixed within dynamics of the team, and only then

5:24 focus on the people. It's not magic, but it works. Hope this helped. If you liked it, like and subscribe. I'll be posting more tips on team building and software building soon. So, thanks for watching.