Joining a new team can be difficult. You lack institutional knowledge and the lingua franca that the rest of the team has - it’s like they’re speaking a language you know at face value but the context tying it together is missing.

“Seek first to understand, then to be understood.” - Habit 5: The 7 Habits of highly Effective People

When we join a new team we want to have an impact right away. Even with good intent this can be disastrous without the right context. There’s an approach to this problem I found on Andrew Bosworth’s site. It helps you quickly gather context and build a framework to base the knowledge around.

This approach starts with an agenda.

The Agenda

25 minutes total. 3 questions.

• 20 minutes: “Tell me everything you think I should know.”
• 3 minutes: “What are the biggest challenges the team has right now?”
• 2 minutes: “Who else should I speak with?”

Bring a notebook, write everything down, only interrupt if you need clarification,and repeat this process for every name you get. If you don’t know where to start, go to your manager.

Tell me everything you think I should know.

This is intentionally vague. The responses you get vary from person to person. Just roll with it. Keep taking notes, and only interrupt for clarification - such as a term you don’t understand.

Architecture of the build system? Ranting about their manager? Favorite restaurant in town? All of this is great. Why? Because you’re learning something new.

Many people expect the universe to be efficient and orderly. It isn’t. Always assume everyone has something to teach you - even when talking about topics that appear to bring no substantive value to the conversation or the business needs. People and organizations are messy so you’ll never know when something is relevant.

You won’t learn everything you’ll need to know with your new team. Not by a long shot. Don’t fret - it’s OK. There’s not nearly enough time for that in these meetings. Learning in depth will take you much, much longer.

Instead, this exercise helps you build rapport and context. Sometimes you’ll find the location of important documentation. Other times you’ll gather important tribal knowledge that’s not documented anywhere. Then again, maybe you’ll get a bit of a history lesson.

Through this you can learn the common language of the team. You’ll start by building out a framework to understand where your context has gaps. This is where all the clarification comes in. You gain knowledge that fills in those gaps so you can hop over the many barriers that prevent you from joining discussions.

What are the biggest challenges the team has right now?

Given the first question this could be redundant - folks will pretty frequently answer it partially as what you need to know. That’s not important, ask it anyway. This question ensures that there is a focused time to understand the perceived challenges that the team faces.

Internalize the bigger problems - the problems that will take a long time to fix. “We’re using an outdated tech stack” or “We aren’t focused on building the primary product”. Maybe they’re complex, maybe systemic, but they won’t be mitigated right away. If you’re in a leadership role, identify how the team could move toward these as long term goals.

The smaller problems are often small enough that the team hasn’t prioritized them. They might be quality of life improvements, or solvable issues with process. Things like “We’re overwhelmed with meetings” or “We have a flakey test in the build that’s been frustrating”. These are good to dig into so you get some quick wins while building your knowledge of the systems at play.

Asynchronously follow up on these if you don’t understand them. You don’t have much time during the meeting, and once you know of its existence you should be able to describe it in an email or slack message.

Who else should I speak with?

This question is incredibly important. Sure, it helps you fan out into the team. At the same time, though, it builds a graph of influence via the frequency of names. Forget what they shared to you the first day. This is the true org chart to guide you through social interactions.

Until you’ve run out of steam I would suggest following up with every name you get. I’d suggest at least talking with some of your peers and your team you’ll be working with on a regular basis. You don’t need to (or maybe can’t) meet with everyone on the team.

The End Goal

None of this is new or too surprising. You’re building relationships within your team. The big value here is in the asking and listening. It shows a respect to the existing team and paves the path to a level of trust.

You’ll end up with more questions than answers, finding you don’t know more than you thought - but at least you’ll know what you didn’t know.