The “me” in “team”
Instead of talking about what you can/can’t get from other teams, make more friends at work
“I can’t get what I need from Product”
“It’s going to take three weeks from Data Engineerin—“
“Marketing wants—“
“Success won’t—“
“Sales—“
Stop talking about teams as a whole!
Maybe some people on sales want a thing, but there’s no amorphous blob called “Sales” that asks (in hive-mind voice) “can I schedule a 20-minute call follow-up” and annoys your team by wanting stuff from you.
The whole point of having companies is that more people can get stuff done better than fewer people. The bigger the scale of a project, the more different skills are needed. Companies put the right people in the right place and point them in the right direction.
But sooooooo often you’ll hear projects stall because one team can’t get what they need from another team.
And then you start to hear stuff like “this isn’t on Product’s roadmap” or “we can never get stuff prioritized by the BI team.” I’ve heard people say it about my team too: “we’ll need a blog post from content.” And so on.
This is like totally ass-backwards for three reasons.
Talking about the team as a whole hides nuance. Content, at various times, has included customer marketing, community, SEO, multimedia, webinars, and other areas — blogging represented a sixth of our people, but it’s what people associate with content. I know there’s similar nuance on product and engineering teams.
Teams are made up of people, and usually you need something from a person. It only makes sense to refer to the whole team if you’re talking about a collective action or incentive structure on the part of that team (e.g. “Success isn’t going to create customer stories because it takes away from the incentivized calls, so we need to incentivize customer references and provide templates”).
You don’t need anything from a team. Most stuff you would ask for, unless it’s wildly unreasonable, is stuff that an expert could get you within a few weeks. You need help from a person with the right skill set — but not from an entire team.
Why is it so hard to get simple stuff from other teams?
If you hear “BI says they can’t prioritize this until next month,” chances are someone made a mistake.
And not because of the timing.
When you go through formal processes with another team, you plug into their current list of priorities. Your question — even if it’s simple — get compared to all the other shit they have to do. And because it’s your question and not theirs, of course it’s going to be the one that slips.
Here’s what’s gone wrong if you hear “BI says they can’t prioritize this” — or any similar comment. Not picking on my good good BI friends!
“BI says.” BI didn’t say anything, because BI is a label applied to a group of people. Which individual person actually said it, and what specifically did they say?
“Prioritize.” What does prioritize mean? Does it mean get it done, or investigate it? Did they give a sense of how easy or difficult the work is?
“Until next month.” Why next month? What are the factors that affect that timeline?
The whole thing is treated as a statement of fact — BI “can’t” prioritize this — when there are almost always vast plains of grey area for you to dance and frolic and pick little monochromatic flowers in.
If you request huge work (and I know it happens), yeah you’re going to get a rightful “no.” But most of the time the work is relatively simple — in the case of BI, 90 minutes understanding the problem and writing the right SQL query — and it doesn’t get prioritized because it’s a faceless ask that takes away from other projects people care about.
And yes, I know that there are sometimes explicit processes in place for you to request stuff from other teams. I am definitely NOT (*wink wink*) advocating that you go around those processes. I definitely WOULD suggest (no wink wink) that you start by understanding what the processes are and seeing if what’s there can serve your purpose. But don’t let that be the end of the conversation.
Because...what if you went in the side door instead of the front?
You don’t need help from a team. You need a friend. Make friends.
You don’t need help from a team, just from a person on a team.
When you don’t have a friend on the team you need help from, you have to go through the whole rigamarole. First you need to figure out who to even talk to. Then you send them a note, and the note has to have more etiquette to it than you’d prefer. Break out the fancy napkins.
You may or may not need a meeting, but you’ll probably have one and it will be booked for 30 minutes instead of the under-10 minutes it requires. Finally you’ll hear about when your work has been scheduled for, and it will be some time between “not as soon as you’d like it done” and “never.”
If you have a friend, you can send them a simple note that says: “hey quick question, what would it take to do [insert thing you want]?” You’ll get an answer quickly, and if the thing you want is easy enough they might even just finish it right then. Worst case, it’s actually quite hard and you have to meet about it, but you get realistic timing and the meeting is more productive anyway.
(This works in reverse too. Just today I got a request via Slack to do work that I wouldn’t normally consider doing. But it’s not too hard and I like the person who asked, so I’ll get it done. They’ve done the same for me on several occasions.)
Some work is hard, processes exist for a reason, and this won’t work for everything. Still, you’ll get more done at work if you make friends, and this is especially true if you make friends in the right places.
How do you make friends at work, he asked, remembering the 2nd grade jungle gym
The sorta tricky part is that you need friends outside of your immediate team — it’s not knowing people from other teams that leads to situations like “well I can’t get what I need from engineering.”
My company right now uses a Slack plugin called “Donut” to make random introductions between two people, and that’s been an easy way to meet.
If you don’t have that, there are moments where people become more visible — a talk they give for the company, or a program they’re involved in, or a moment where you work with them for another project — and you can make the most of those moments.
1. When people do cool stuff, I slack them that I thought the thing they did was cool. I do this because I actually thought it was cool, and because people deserve to hear when their work was appreciated. Later it pays off for me too, because it starts a dialogue or makes it easier to have a separate conversation later.
2. When I’ve just worked on a project with someone new, I’ll try to find another related project to keep the relationship going. At work, most of the way people get to know each other is through their joint work. More joint work = better knowing each other.
3. When it’s clear that our teams will often work together, but that I may not always be the main point of contact on my team (e.g. marketing will work with data engineering, but the same person from data engineering works with different people from marketing), I consider setting up one-on-ones.
Are one-on-ones productive? No idea. Mostly no.
But the relationship they help build makes possible projects that would be otherwise impossible, which is like infinite return the time they take. Ongoing conversations will make you the most informed person on your team too, so when your two teams work together, you have the most context and can contribute to the big decisions.
Besides, 30 minutes of talking about work without actually working can be a welcome respite at the end of a long week.
Next time you have trouble getting what you need from another team, recognize that it’s because you need a friend on that team. Then make friends.