From a Group of People to a Team: What Changes in the LAN Layer
A group of people sharing a project isn’t automatically a team. The difference shows up when there are clear roles, shared processes, and something like a common identity: a “north star” everyone understands the same way.
In the LAN layer of the book — the layer of your team — the starting point is honestly identifying what state your team is in today. Not every team needs the same kind of intervention: a new team has different problems than a team that’s been working together for years but has lost cohesion during a phase of rapid growth.
Some questions that help diagnose it:
- Do the people on the team understand their role, or are they improvising it?
- Is there a clear career path, or does growth depend on who shouts the loudest?
- Does the team have its own processes, or does it just inherit the organization’s without questioning them?
- Is there a shared goal that everyone could explain in their own words?
None of these questions has a purely technical answer. That’s why, for many engineers moving into leadership, this layer is the most uncomfortable one: it doesn’t come with documentation, and the mistakes take weeks or months to show up.
This article only summarizes the opening of the Identifying Team Status chapter. The book goes on to cover roles, career paths, onboarding, communication, and the five dysfunctions of a team with real examples from technical organizations. Get it on Leanpub.