Loading…
Topic
Teamwork
9 posts about Teamwork. Every summary links to the original.
- 9 posts
- 6 companies
The Good Stuff
Paid picks we use ourselves. Links carry a referral code — a subscription through one earns us a commission at no extra cost to you.
Newest first
Posts
How We Spread Engineering Knowledge & Culture Across Intercom
Large engineering organizations often face siloed knowledge and culture as teams focus on their own domains. Intercom addresses this with engineering tours, where engineers temporarily transfer to another team to work on a specific project, such as building a scalable solution for database performance issues. New engineers go on tour within their first few months, and all engineers are encouraged to tour at least once a year. Tours are designed with a mentor and can be feature-oriented, shipping a new product or tool with a demo at the weekly Show and Tell, or tech-debt oriented, fixing bugs or performance issues. Beyond code, tours build relationships and spread culture across offices in Dublin, London, and San Francisco, and the concept has expanded to other departments like Customer Support and Marketing; engineers bring back learnings to their home teams.
An Upstanding Brand: How Team Values Influence How We Work
Intercom’s Brand Studio defines core values to guide behavior and decision-making without micromanagement as the team scales. The values answer four fundamental questions about why the team exists, what it does, how it behaves, and how it will succeed, and are written as reflections of who the team wants to be, not platitudes. Key values include building trust through vulnerability and inclusivity, making each other better through accountability and learning from diversity, and loving kind and open-minded people who reject mediocrity and are always kind. The values also emphasize supporting the mission, seeking to understand problems and each other, balancing art and science, and encouraging experimentation with considered risks and acceptance of failure. They are woven into branding, hiring, leveling, process work, and performance reviews to define success in expected behavior, and are intended to be discussed and evolved to help the team do the best work of their careers.
The golden mean of design and engineering - The Intercom Blog
The post draws on Aristotle’s golden mean to argue that great products require a balance between design and engineering, not compromise. Engineers naturally focus on functionality and performance, wanting to ship features and increase speed often without customer requests, while designers aim for optimal user flows and catch subtle interaction details. The OAuth implementation exemplifies this, with engineers building the technical side and designers crafting user flows, each pursuing their own self-interest through daily stand-ups and whiteboard sessions rather than compromising. This self-interest, guided by Adam Smith’s invisible hand, yields superior products than continual compromise, which leads to mediocrity. The post recommends embedding designers in product teams via a hub-and-spoke model, and leaders trusting their teams to find equilibrium rather than imposing rules.
Introducing Claude Tag
Claude Tag is a Slack-based way for teams to delegate work to Claude by tagging @Claude in shared channels, with access to selected tools, data, and codebases. Claude breaks requests into stages, uses permitted tools, replies in threads, retains relevant channel context, and can pursue scheduled tasks asynchronously; ambient behavior can also surface information and follow up on unresolved work. Administrators scope Claude identities, memories, tools, and information by channel, set organization- and channel-level token-spend limits, and review activity logs, while users can also message Claude privately. Available in beta to Claude Enterprise and Team customers, Claude Tag replaces the existing Claude in Slack app, works with Opus 4.8, and is credited with creating 65% of the product team’s code through Anthropic’s internal version.
Welcoming Kelsey Mills, our new Operations Generalist
Kelsey Mills is joining Resend as an Operations Generalist based in Vancouver, Washington, with responsibility for the logistics behind upcoming offsites, meetups, and conferences. She describes operations as work that suits her organizational instincts: managing many moving parts, absorbing new information, balancing tasks, and refining processes for greater efficiency. Mills says Resend’s attention to detail, care of craft, culture, and community attracted her during a period of growth and scalability. Outside work, she mentions a Michigan sunset as her home-screen image, Hawaii as a favorite destination, the Notes app as a reliable tool, and Ctrl + Cmd + Spacebar as her favorite hotkey; her advice to ambitious operations generalists is to value their work, keep raising their hands, and say yes to opportunities.
For Teams – Tools & craft – Notion
The page presents a collection of Notion content about teams, tools, workplace practices, and the use of AI in organizational work. Its entries cover Custom Agents for automating repetitive busywork, teamwork skills, launch orchestration, and the changing role of team size. Several pieces focus on disconnected company knowledge, describing Notion AI as a way to bring information together and turn knowledge into action, while other entries examine AI operating systems and workflows. The page also includes survey-based perspectives from Notion, including research involving more than 3,000 global knowledge workers, 85-plus interviews, and 650 European business leaders, alongside customer stories from companies such as Merge, Ramp, Chronicle, Toyota, Affirm, and Mercury.
The 10 teamwork skills everyone needs
Workplace collaboration depends on interpersonal skills that help groups interact productively while preserving individuals’ independence. The post identifies ten core capabilities: communication, active listening, respect, conflict resolution, accountability, delegation, problem-solving, open-mindedness, self-awareness, and trust. It explains how these skills address practical team problems, from siloed information and excessive workloads to miscommunication, unresolved disagreements, and emotional reactions, while noting that effective communication requires balance rather than constant messages or meetings. Improvement relies on setting one goal at a time, requesting honest feedback, and observing effective teammates; the post also recommends tailoring a CV’s examples to an employer’s values and keeping entries brief. Notion is presented as a platform for roadmaps, one-on-ones, team pages, and wikis.
How We Enable Our Interns to Make an Impact
Shopify describes an internship model in which interns work on projects affecting merchants, partners, and developers, including merchant pain points such as selling across channels. The program combines autonomy comparable to that of full-time employees with mentorship, regular pair programming, unfamiliar challenges, and cross-team collaboration. Examples include launching the Amazon Channel, changing an Android app design pattern across multiple codebases while limiting effects on third-party developers, backfilling affiliate data with Elasticsearch and Ruby on Rails, and generating Java and Swift models from a strongly typed GraphQL schema. Interns are encouraged to investigate open-ended problems, consult documentation and stakeholders, and develop informed recommendations with mentor support. Returning interns can change teams or roles, while tools such as Slack enable direct communication across the organization; the stated result is practical experience, deeper technical knowledge, and potential full-time opportunities.
Retrospectives
Retrospectives are presented as a way for software engineering teams to review operational incidents, investigate root causes, create remediation tasks, and improve teamwork. Beyond technical review, the process can focus on emotional and human aspects of projects, including interactions and ways to work better together. The suggested timing includes post-incident or post-project sessions, mid-project course corrections, and weekly meetings; a 90-minute Friday session one week after a project ends is described as effective, while next-day and three-week delays are discouraged. An active, neutral facilitator should prepare an agenda and guest list, state a clear purpose, involve everyone, and use one or two activities such as a timeline, five whys, or Start Doing / Stop Doing / Keep Doing brainstorming.
Related topics
All topics →Weekly digest
The best engineering reads, once a week.