Behind the Mask of High Performance

I joined a mature team. This team had a teammate who looked like a highly motivated developer. Every task was done on time. He delivered a high-quality code. And... During a one-to-one, he mentioned that he feels demotivated and doesn't like the project.

It was a big surprise for me because he always said that everything was going well. To be honest, it was always very difficult to speak with him. Because he is a very close person and doesn't like any discussions. So... Possessing this knowledge, we discussed a lot about scrum event improvements in our team—how to reduce the number and duration of all the meetings we have.

We revisited his story together, and I noticed that he had been working on one really huge task for months despite it being split into multiple tasks. Moreover, after months of working on the story, he didn't understand the purpose and value of the whole team's backlog.

I touched on topics about the business value of the tasks and tasks sizing with the team. I noticed, that the team asked a lot of questions to the business in the past, and they were not answered. Every teammate works only on his item and doesn't care about others' tasks.

I encouraged the team to split the tasks into items that could be handled by other team members, fostering a shared responsibility. They were interested in spreading their knowledge and open to something new.

I discussed with the PO and PM to create a meeting with the team to explain the business purpose of the tasks that the team is working on. We created an improvement plan that includes short presentations to cover all aspects of their tasks from the business point of view.

As a result, I got positive feedback from developers and managers. Because during the sessions a lot of items were simplified and improvement.

Finally, I always ask business to explain the purpose of a project to a team before the team starts work on it.