7 things that will keep your dev team happy for a year

As you are searching for people to join your team, there are three 3 components you should be looking for in every candidate's personality. The components will tell you how the person integrates with the team, and the company, as well as what motivates them and how they will be willing to grow.

While looking for people to join your team, there are three 3 personality factors to consider

These are

• Compensation (financial reward) - salary, stock options, bonus.

• Pride (social reward) - cool product, famous company.

• Career (professional reward) - modern technology, true ownership, promotions.

The same 3 are also the characteristics people look for in your company.

Speaking of ownership, I highly recommend reading the "Extreme Ownership" book by Jocko Willink. It has changed a lot in my approach to management and team leadership.

It is an amazing book that is intended for experienced leaders that are interested in upgrading their skills. I've been giving it as a gift to some clients of mine as well, and that was very well accepted.

As your company runs out of one of the three factors, the other two will help you keep afloat.

Have a product that does not sell? You might consider raising salaries and promoting some good folks to keep the team motivated. That means you are replacing the pride with compensation.

The budget is limited or career path is on hold? Put all your cards in allowing the team to dictate the technology and the development process.

What are the 7 components that will absolutely keep the team out of worry?

Frequent releases to production

Nobody wants to work for months without delivering anything. Be these real users, beta testers, or the internal QA team, features have to flow to the human beings using it on a daily basis.

Being able to influence the core

The most significant component of any professional growth is the ability to control the product end-to-end: designing, developing, delivering, and monitoring. One starts writing code, then is allowed to deploy to production where the results can be seen operating under different conditions. All these bring experience, bond people with the product, and bring the ability to define better systems.

The backlog is maintained

An organized backlog is like a well-maintained house - everything is predictable and easy to find. It should not be bloated and neither be empty.

At every given moment, the backlog should be able to supply you with tasks at scale.

The current sprint is the chapter you are going through while the backlog is the book that tells the rest of the story.

There are tasks for every level of experience and expertise

People are different in their backgrounds, preferences, and ambition. There should be enough tasks to serve all types of performers your team has.

Short-term goals and long-term vision are clear

The biggest fear of every team is the uncertainty of goals. As the roadmap frequently changes, definitions get modified, and the work gets affected, the road of development turns into a stream of short fixes, and as a result - the spaghetti code nobody wants to touch anymore.

A stable roadmap brings better quality.

Bugs get addressed regularly

Being able to create new code while taking care of bugs, is an art not many can do for a long time.

If you don’t fix bugs, your clients will get frustrated, developers will assume the quality is not important and the final product will degrade very quickly.

Taking care of bugs keeps your team’s motivation in shape.

Work-life balance is justified

People work hard, and they can work harder if goals are justified and defined. Be transparent, motivate your team, get the work done, and pay them back by respecting their personal life.