The 5 Core Traits of Highly Effective Dev Teams

It doesn’t matter where in the world your development team is, the effectiveness of a team is often determined by their ability to follow instructions. However, not all instructions are created at the same granularity, with certain teams requiring more help than others.

Truly effective teams are teams that are able to fill in the blanks — meaning that you don’t have to micro-manage their every output and put onto paper exact, down to the minute details with pixel-perfect precision, to get what you need for them to deliver.

They are effective because they are self-sufficient, self-governing and have an intrinsic understanding of your strategic goals. 

While these things make a good summary of what an effective development team looks like, how would you go about spotting one in the wild?

Your Project Manager Understands Your Business

Every effective team starts off with a fantastic project manager. But how do you know if they’ll be good for your business? 

It has to do with how well they understand your business.

Your project manager’s role is to govern the sequence of tasks, how each is slotted and fitted into one another, and ultimately making suggestions and recommendations to the business on the final trajectory of the application creation process.

If your project manager doesn’t understand your business, they can’t effectively implement your strategic requirements because they don’t have the foresight to do so. This is because you can’t effectively implement what you don’t understand.

Your Front End Devs Understand Design

Front end development is more than just code. It’s a series of disciplines melting into a space that bridges visual communication with code. 

There are a lot of front end developers out in the wild who don’t understand or have knowledge of design concepts. As a result, their production value and ability to think on their feet is reduced.

Their lack of aesthetics will be transferred to the final product when there isn’t a complete document dictating what everything should look like.

A front end developer that understands design will be able to naturally fill in the gaps and code to the conditions rather than needing the conditions set out for them. 

Your Back End and Infrastructure Devs Understand Your Strategic Trajectory

Everything boils down to data. But data isn’t just data — it is the embodiment of your business. It is your customers. It is your product. It is the essence that makes up your business. 

Without data, you can’t really do much.

When your backend and infrastructure developers understand your strategic trajectory, they are better at deciding how to handle your data and know what to expect when it comes to volumes and load. They can build for growth, anticipate spikes and handle future changes and transformations.

Solid backend and infrastructure developers not only know how to code but how to translate your business into code. They are capable of being immersive in your business by design and are therefore able to make correct judgments on what your business actually needs in the present and for potential future changes. 

Your Team Understands How to Talk to Each Other

Communication is key to the progression of an app’s journey towards completion and deployment. It doesn’t matter where your developers are located physically — whether in the same office or across different borders — if they know how to communicate to one another, bugs and clarifications can be resolved much faster.

It’s one thing to be able to talk, it’s another to be able to perform acts of meaningful communication. Effective teams know how to raise issues, how to address their own shortcomings and help others overcome their hurdles. They are collaborative by nature, open to suggestions, changes, and challenges.

An effective project manager also knows how to create an environment for meaningful communication and are actively ensuring the quality and standards of communication that flows between developers and the business. 

When good communication habits and their expected standards are established, work is often completed at a faster rate as developers are not spending their time trying to decipher the silence of their peers. 

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Highly effective development teams are autonomous in nature. You can give them the skeleton of your idea and they will do the rest.

This is because they possess a subset of skills that are not just related to their ability to code. Rather, it’s to do with their ability to translate the world into code — and that is the thing that differentiates a sub-par developer from a highly efficient one. 

Good teams don’t run on hack jobs, but rather they work on robust solutions in order to deliver solid applications. They have enough real-world and code related experiences to make the right connections between them. They are well rounded and have the ability to understand your business.

Because at the end of the day, code is the transplantation of your business in the digital space.

 Co-authored by:

Dave Wesley ~ President, SRG
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Aphinya Dechalert ~ Marketing Communications, SRG
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