How do I learn from a "failed" experience shipping a project?
I joined a big tech company and in my first six months I was assigned to be project lead for my team in tandem with a dysfunctional team (their tech lead was junior and was managed out)
The project was completed, but unfortunately not rolled out to production due to minor issues and holidays around the corner.
I do not think there will be major negative consequences for myself as I will be moving onto a different org and project with other scope.
However this was an eye opening experience to be part of such a poor performing team. I worked very hard to put everything together, but felt that folks around me kept dropping the ball; objectives misalignment, poor communication, no sense of urgency etc.
I want to learn from this experience. What are some questions I can ask myself and learnings that I can take to other jobs?
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Discussion
(2 comments)- 12 months agoSDE @ Amazon - www.anamazonsde.com
Failures is how we learn.
I guess the biggest lesson I would see, is that, being senior, it's a part of your job to lead the team to success and lead by example, now there are cases where hardest work with certain teams would not get results as well, but I have seen in many times that just applying that effort into making sure the tech team does their best, and gets an opportunity to learn and deliver impact always pays off.
I don't know the exact specifics of that work your team did, and I trust you already are judging in a fair way, but I would also advice to be cautious of falling the trap of blaming others for dropping the ball etc..
- 02 months agoEng @ Taro
However this was an eye opening experience to be part of such a poor performing team. I worked very hard to put everything together, but felt that folks around me kept dropping the ball; objectives misalignment, poor communication, no sense of urgency etc.
I would try to put together a retrospective doc for yourself for generating ideas of how to get ahead of a lot of the issues that you were facing.
- Did I have a timeline in place to map out critical milestones?
- Was the timeline reasonable, and did it account for PTO, holidays, buffer for other tasks?
- At each critical milestone, how did I ensure that the deliverables met the standards that were initially set out?
- Was there enough direction in the docs/tasks for the team to follow through smoothly?
- For communication issues, were there project syncs in place to ensure that people could voice any troubles or delays that might happen?
- Did the team feel like they had the ownership to feel like they were really contributing?
