Growing a Team By Investing in Tools
Where many teams struggle however is in finding the right balance of building out the product versus “sharpening the saw” by improving their tools and automating processes. With the same people attempting to do both jobs that contention is unavoidable.
The solution then is to build a second team who’s job is entirely focussed on building, maintaining, configuring and improving the tools that the product team uses. Since the majority of tools used by a project are fairly orthogonal to the project itself – and often shared with other product teams – the tool team can be much more independent, reducing the communication overhead. Not only do the product team now have more time to devote to improving the product, they are continuously made more productive because of the work done by the tools team.