Team Selection: Finding Strong Teams

TL;DR - Why strong teams are important + How to find strong teams

NOTE: This post is primarily geared toward Facebook Bootcamp Team Selection but can be applied to any team setting.

🙋‍♂️ Strong Teams are Foundation for Strong Products + Careers

In my opinion, more than any other factor to success is a strong team. An effective team should enable the following:

• Product Direction - Prioritizing the most important metrics so that we solve critical path issues.
• Distributed Responsibilities - Definitive ownership so contributors can focus and avoid thrash.
• Growth + Scale - Opportunities to continue learning and level up your technical / product knowledge.

Outcomes from a strong team include:

• Reaching Team Goals - Commitments to metric goals are aggressive yet attainable. Meeting expecations are baseline for success.
• Career Progression - Mentorship from your teammates pave a path forward for your growth.
• Sustainable Work Life Balance - Contributors stay because they can juggle work and avoid compromising external responsibilities.

💪 Signals of Strong Teams

Look for the following during team selection:

• Consistent Track Record - Teams meet their goals they committed to half over half.
• Healthy Pulse Surveys - Anonymous surveys mention work sentiment.
• Tenured Contributors - Turnover is low + teammembers want to stay.

How to Find Strong Teams

🔍 Doing Your Research

• Comms - What type of content are team members posting? Are they active in communities / forums?
• Diffs / Commits - What type of code are team members committing? Evalute the code + meta critically - is the code polished? Is the Summary + Test Plan thorough? How are team members communiating though code? Inline comments?

❓ Questions to ask the Hiring Managers

• What are the goals of your team?
• What does the day to day look like? (Running A/B Tests? Working on new features?)
• What meetings take place + what are they for?
• Who should I talk to next? (Possibly the Tech Lead, Project Manager, Senior Engineers, etc.)

Conclusion + Next Steps

I hope reading this post provides more clarity about finding your next team. I encourgae you to be curious and ask lots of questions - this will be the team you will be spending your working days with so it is best to do your homework and find your best match!

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👍 If you learned something new or this post helped you in your team search, please consider sharing!

Alex Takahashi is a software engineer working in San Francisco. He finished his Bachelor’s Degree from UC Berkeley in Bioengineering and eventually found himself becoming a programmer in Silicon Valley. Visit his profile to learn more about his path to become a professional in the tech industry.