Today I learned that we need to keep doing something that we have found really works: At Trim, we believe that a lean, cross-functional team of three can build a product. To us, that team of three is made up of one product design lead, one product development lead, and one product strategist. We call this a micro team, and each team member’s role is required.

We have [all] seen how greatly velocity can be impacted when teams invest too much human capital on a project. It is business law that your output does not grow at the same multiplier of “personnel” on a project. At some point, often said to be over 6 people on any team, you begin to see clear diminishing return as more and more team members contribute to one single business unit. On any given sprint, we will augment a team with more resources only if necessary, as we try to keep our efficiency as high as possible.

Our formula is to hire consultants that embody the skill and the empathy to make decisions in their domain and align with the value and core mission of the product owner’s feature set. Our developers need to flag designs that will double the scope versus an alternative solution, our designers need to flag a work-flow that strategy has over-complicated, and we all need to be able to assemble as often as needed to align with those pivots.

Today I learned that we need to establish some critical structure, largely that we hope is going to come with the addition of a dedicated scrum master at Team Trim. As we all grow to becoming ‘agilelists,’ we have identified the need to define two critical functions of our sprint activity:

1. We need a Demo Day structure so that each of our team members and micro teams are covering the same material, tooling, nomenclature, and process with our product owners.

2. We need to continually define and celebrate “the blocker.” The blocker is not a bad word, and we aim to grown comfortable with identifying problems that other team members can solve. We fully understand that sometimes, there is someone on the team that is blocking another team member, but this is what we hope to grow comfortable in talking through.