When assembling a new team, you start with a few specialists. Your bus factor is 1. If the backend developer takes the day off, frontend is stuck. Unless ... you've found yourself a few T-shaped individuals who know the stack broadly but are specialists in an area. You share the knowledge so everyone has a broad understanding of how things work, and they can pick up the slack in a pinch. Ideally, you also have one or two generalists. That way, even though you've built yourself a small team, you don't have walled gardens but an open field where everyone can pick up and do the work that needs to be done. Yours, Taj |
Hi, I’m Taj Pelc. Building for the web and leading engineering teams for 15+ years.