What do you do when you're tasked with leading a team, but you don't know much about what you're doing either?
It's always great when you get a project to work on. You have a vision of what you want to work on, the ideas are flowing at 2 a.m. (like they are right now lol), you have an idea of what you'd like to see in your app, and you start going hard working on it—locally and GitHub, locally and on GitHub, back and forth—until you're doing the finishing touches before you submit your work. What happens when you're working in a group?
It becomes... well, complicated. You can't control when everyone will work, so the git conflicts become so much that you feel like crying debugging it for two hours. You don't have a clue what everyone's vision is for the project, and you can't control how individuals code.
I have to admit I was not prepared for the task that was ahead of me as a scrum master who barely knows how to code the language. So here are my two cents on how to lead a group when you don't know what you're doing:
- Have an introductory meeting
Speak to people. These are not people you just need to delegate to, you need to speak to your team to understand who they are, how they work, what are their prefered work times, what are their prefered communication stles. These things go a long way in understanding your team as people you are working with - How do I answer questions?
Google lol. That's how all developers have figured out since the dawn of modern search engines and that's how you'll figure out the answers to your team's questions because let's be real, you don't know the answers to the questions yourself, so don't act like a know-it-all, be humble enough to admit that you don't know and get to researching! - Give benefit of the doubt
Sometimes it's tough to deal with team members because of conflicting personalities but just remember you're probably not easy to deal with either in other situations. Just - Get ahead of the conflicts!
This ties to the point below, communicate with your team how you'd like the team to work, once everyone has spoken about what time they'd like to work, feel free to set clear expectations of what it required for the project and how you'll work(meeting times, distribution of work etc) - Communicate
There were times when I felt that I was talking to the void when I texted in the group, but tbh I'd rather talk to myself than miss out on informing my team about something important. It's important that you let your team know crucial updates when and how they happen.
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