You have been preparing, excelled in the
interviews and now joined a new company. Or maybe you just switched
teams in the same company. You're excited but maybe
also a little bit scared too. How do you cause a good first impression?
How do you get up to speed as soon as possible and start providing value?
and how do you gain your team's trust? I'm Christian and today I'm going to give
you some tips based on my own experience in different companies and teams, and also
learnings that I've seen from other software developers that can help you to get up to
speed as soon as possible in your new team. Welcome to A Dev' Story! First of all, it's very
important to know your position. There are quite a few differences
in terms of expectations between a Junior Developer or a more Senior one, and
expectations can also vary between companies. Typically, as a Junior Developer your
responsibility will be yourself and trying to become more autonomous in the team.
As you start growing, your influence and responsibility grows to that of the team,
the organization, and even company-wide. So your role expectations may vary based on this. I recommend you to watch Beyond Developer from Dan North to know a little bit more about
how to grow as a software developer. Having said that, my first tip is to Clear your Role Expectations as soon as you
join the company or the new team. There are different ways to get
this information. Typically, the company will have a role description
for your position that you should check. You could also ask directly: What do you expect from me? or
variations/complementary questions like: What can I do to make your job easier? or
What would you do if you were in my position? Ask people in the team what they expect from you.
Here, of course, the most important opinion will come from your manager, but it's also good to ask
other roles, like maybe the product person or the most senior developers in the team, and sometimes
even some stakeholders can be also useful. My second tip is to Understand the Team's Culture.
Identify what are the communication patterns in the team.
How do people prefer to communicate? Do they prefer more formal
or informal communication? Do they prefer chats or Zoom calls?
What are the team agreements? Some things will be quite obvious or you
can get direct answers by just asking them. Other things will be a little bit more subtle
and the team might not even be aware of them happening. There will be unconscious biases and
even some inertia in the team based on the time they have been working together.
Try to understand and adapt first to the way the team is used to doing
things before suggesting new changes. There are different ways to ask questions to
get more information. Something direct like: What are the team agreements?
How do you prefer to communicate? or a little bit more subtle like, What is the best way to get
input and feedback from you? My third tip is to Focus on Priorities. It can be hard to fully focus on the highest
priority things when there are multiple of them. Ask the team and the different roles about
what are the highest priorities and try to clear them as soon as possible.
Then, when you get your first task, you will know how important it
is and how much time to invest. Learn the highest priority things first. If there are too many one of the things,
something that I do is to apply the Pareto Law [Principle] trying to take the
two most important things out of 10. In terms of people, also identify what are the highest priority stakeholders
both for you and for your team. There are tools like the Influence Matrix
that can allow you to understand it better. In terms of questions, some useful ones are: What are the top priorities for the team? What can be dropped?
What cannot be dropped? What happens if feature A doesn't get
delivered but feature B is instead? Who should I meet outside of the team? My fourth tip is to Ship Something Small Quickly. Different teams have different
ways of shipping changes to live. Some teams do Continuous Deployments, others do
deliveries at the end of the Sprint, for example. There are also spoken and unspoken team
conventions when shipping changes to live. One of the things that you can do in your first
two weeks is to ship a very simple piece of code. By doing this, you will learn a lot of things
like: what are some of the team agreements, what are the tools used for coding for
committing changes for releases, who do you need to notify and even get some permissions
that you need to get approved out of the way. This way, when you need to do
a more complex change you will have a clearer vision of what
is the full release process. My fifth tip is: Take Your Time Learning. Truth be told, most people won't expect the new person to be productive in
the first weeks or even months. It's better to take your time, even if under
pressure, to understand the most important things in depth, as opposed to rushing through them and
then finding some important gaps down the line. So take advantage of these low expectations from
the team in the first weeks in order to explore a little more the code base or identify areas where
you have some gaps and ask for help in those. As you have seen throughout this video,
ask a lot of questions. Enjoy the extra focus time these first weeks in order to be
kind of in a "training" or "learning mode". Bonus tip: Have Fun and Bring your Value. A job is a way of living but it's also a
way to learn new things and meet new people. Take the opportunity and the time to learn about
the things that you find interesting. You can also share some fun facts, articles, learnings
or even new approaches to your new team. Maybe there are things that you have solved
in the past and you can provide the team with a quick solution for something, or grab
those "low-hanging fruits" as they are called. The team will be happy to have you with them
and by presenting some new ways of doing things, good challenges on current approaches
or learning about new technologies, will make you and your team to
be happier to work together. Now is my time to ask you: What additional tips do you have
for someone joining a new team?
