🛰️ Signal Boost

Why the Team Is the Product

Most engineering leaders are measured by what their teams ship. It’s tempting to believe that success is defined by velocity, clean roadmaps, and hitting release milestones. But the longer I’ve been in this role, the clearer it’s become: the real product we’re building is the team itself.

Code can be rewritten. Features can be reprioritized. But a healthy, high-trust team — one that collaborates well, learns fast, and takes ownership — compounds value over time. A great team ships great products. A dysfunctional team slows everything down, no matter how good the plan is.

Early in my career, I joined a team that was taking over a long-running product from another group during a major org shift. We had smart people. Interesting problems. All the right intentions. But we struggled to deliver. We kept trying to fix things with process: retros, new sprint rituals, better tickets. Nothing stuck. In some cases, our velocity actually got worse.

It wasn’t until we changed how we formed the teams — optimizing for trust, ownership, and how people supported one another — that things began to click. Once we became a real team, not just a collection of individuals, our output didn’t just stabilize — it accelerated.

Features get deployed. Teams stick around.

If you’re a leader, ask yourself: what are you building this quarter — a backlog of features, or a team you’d want to rehire in a heartbeat?

🔗 Lead Link

One standout article from the web that delivers signal, not noise.

Gelling Your Engineering Leadership Team — Will Larson

staffeng.com/stories/gelling-your-engineering-leadership-team

Why this matters:

In teams, cohesion isn’t just cultural fluff—it’s operational leverage. Larson outlines what it looks like when leadership actually works as a team instead of a collection of roles. That idea mirrors today’s Signal Boost: if the team isn’t healthy, neither is the output.

A few of my favorite points:

• Connection isn’t automatic — it has to be built deliberately over time.

• Norms are foundational — without them, decisions become unpredictable.

• Informal space (Slack chatter, 1:1s, team banter) is where trust grows.

Try this:

Take one idea from Larson’s piece (like “more frequent, smaller syncs” or “explicit values alignment”) and do a micro-retro with your leadership team: What are our norms? Do we trust them? Do they still serve us?

🛠️ Tactical Byte

A quick tip or tactic you can try this week.

👥 Run a team health check, but keep it simple.

In your next retro, ask one question: “What’s one thing that would make this team more effective?”

Don’t over-structure it—just listen, take notes, and look for patterns. You’ll surface more than process issues. You’ll surface team issues.

🎙️ From the Field

An insight, quote, or story from an experienced tech leader.

Early in my career, I made the classic mistake of trying to improve delivery by focusing only on Jira boards and burndown charts. I thought if we just moved faster—tightened up sprint planning, pushed harder on deadlines—we’d magically ship more.

It didn’t work. Morale dipped, and ironically, throughput slowed.

Eventually, I started paying closer attention to how the team communicated. How decisions were made. Whether people felt heard. How feedback moved through the system.

So I shifted my focus. I invested more in better standups, clearer ownership, stronger one-on-ones. We redesigned our retros to surface hard truths. I even started watching how often engineers asked each other for help—an underappreciated sign of trust.

The results? The same team, same roadmap, same engineers—just working with more trust and clarity. And suddenly, delivery picked up. Bugs dropped. Engineers started anticipating problems instead of just reacting to them. All the metrics I used to obsess over? They got better when I stopped treating them as the goal.

That experience solidified it for me: Code is just a lagging indicator of culture.

The team is the product. Everything else is just an output.

💬 Open Threads

Something to chew on, debate, or share back—open questions for curious minds.

What’s one moment when your team really clicked? Or if it hasn’t happened yet, what do you think is standing in the way?