Strengths and Challenges on Parade!

If you're a FE Team member, use these 5 simple strengths to accomplish your goals (but don't forget to overcome these 4 weird challenges)

This comes as a suprise to no one, but over the past few years we've all been dealing with quite a few shake ups and the Front End Team is no exception! So what better way to provide some stability then to have a clearly defined vision and mission?

👀 Vision

Industry leading user experience on demand.

🎯 Mission

Bring designs to life with consistent, industry-leading implementation at speeds that will satisfy products strategy and support our stakeholders.

🔬 Under the Microscope

With these guideposts in place we know exactly where we're heading. To help us figure out how to get there, we decided to put our heads together and figure out what made our team tick! What unique strengths would allow us to accomplish our goals? What challenges would we need to overcome on the way?

After several insightful discussions, I am delighted to finally share what we've found! Feast your eyes on the summary below or check out the full Strengths section here and the full Challenges section here.

💪 Strengths

• Consistency - By establishing best practices, patterns, and tools that are consistent across products, we can more easily move between efforts.
• Collaboration / Knowledge sharing - We assist each other through blockers and we share our solutions and failures to prevent our teammates from retreading old ground.
• High Bus Factor - Through knowledge sharing we prevent any individual team member from being the only source of critical expertise.
• Specialization - By focusing on Front End responsibilities we develop a deeper understanding of the tools, standards, and practices we need to accomplish our mission.
• Partnership with Design/UX - We use open communication and a shared language to work closely with Design/UX to gain insight into the customers' needs.

🚧 Challenges

• Design Handoff - Unasked questions often results in incorrect assumptions about a design's implemention leading to inefficiency and rework.
• Products' Needs - It is difficult to keep up-to-date with each product's needs as we frequently switch between efforts, making our knowledge sharing and parternship with Product Teams crucial.
• Product Team collaboration - Each Product Team has their own way of doing things and the best way to collaborate differs from team to team. By being clear with what our team needs, we can provide the foundation of a strong partnership.
• Knowing where our role starts and ends - When we are unsure of our responsibilities, it is difficult to collaborate with our partners. By defining our core responsibilities clearly we are able to focus on the work within our realm of expertise and maintain flexibility when our tasks border other teams.

🎀 Tying it all together

Just getting this all out in the open gave us a fresh perspective on what we do, and all the partnerships that made it possible. With all that in mind, it was time to take a step back and see what we learned.

🔎 Observation - It's all connected

During our discussions, what hit me again and again is how each Strength and Challenge tied in with another. Having consistent practices and making a commitment to knowledge sharing both make it easier to maintain a high bus factor. By defining our roles clearly, it makes collaborating with Product Teams easier, which in turn lets us more effectively understand the needs of each product we support. Our specialization into Front End matters make us to provide more valuable insight when partnering with the design team. All of these feed of each other so we're never working at cross purposes!

🚀 Where do we go from here?

Knowing what's driving us toward our goals, and the challenges we need to account for, it's easy to see that one thing can bring our team to new heights: open communication! It's what let's us share our knowledge, forge effective partnerships, define our roles, you name it! We've built momentum with these discussions, and that's just the start. We'll continue our commitment to communicating inside and outside our team to continue to build our strengths and overcome any challenges that come our way. Speaking of communication... we've started a new blog, maybe you've heard of it?