🧑🤝🧑Our Approach to Learning
Tech Fleet's approach to learning is based on Agile coaching principles. Teammates experience the rigors and challenges of self-organized teamwork as servant leaders to each other. Learn more below.
Leveling Up in Agile is Not About Your Skills or Experience
You may have a perception in your head that if only you had more experience and more skills, you can join teams and immediately start producing work.
You may think that expert Agile teams in the world are very experienced in what they do.
This is a false perception.
Expert Agile teams are experts in navigating uncertainty, experts in pivoting, and experts in supporting growth of others.
They are not necessarily experts in hard skills. They progress through product development by being of service to each other as they manage risks and build a working process together.
Yes, we're all here to make a living. We're all here trying to deliver results. We want to ship products. We want to have job security. We've got to make management happy if we want to stay working at a company.
But Agile teamwork is not really about producing work itself.
Any one person with skills and experience can perform work.
Not all teams can perform work efficiently. They may be in a continuous storm of conflict.
To work as a unified Agile team, teams must look past the skills and tight deadlines. They must look past seeking perfect outcomes. They must provide environments for experimentation, risk taking, learning, and personal growth. They must help each other build psychological safety, service leadership, self-organization, and continuous improvement.
Agile Teams Help Each Other Grow
Teams that are Agile have the following foundations of active listening, empathy, understanding, learning, and support.
They make their own calls about how to prioritize work. Agile teams don't try to control outcomes or prevent failure. They play out scenarios and respond to change.
They collaborate and build working results quickly so that they can learn how to change their plans. The team decides how to work, and when to prioritize, and what to deliver. This requires a whole lot of foundational Agile culture and mindsets.
Expert Agile teams provide the space for others to disagree and hear people out. They support each other in failing "fast" together, adjusting their work, and looking in reflection. They never judge or blame each other.
The more a team provides these, the more a team produces strong end-results. The faster they will ship their product. The stronger that product will become at market.
Read more in the Agile Handbook:
🤝Agile TeamworkTech Fleet's Learning Environment
Tech Fleet apprenticeships and community education offer an environment to fail forward with teams and gives you the same experience as you’d get on an agency or in-house teams. Tech Fleet works with actual clients and works on open source product ideas, giving you a true-to-life experience of what it's like building products in the world.
Peers learn from other peers; apprentices learn from other apprentices; apprentices learn from co-leads; co-leads learn from apprentices, or other co-leads. No one is the "expert" or the "boss", and everybody is learning together. When we can get them, community contributors join projects as mentors for subject matter expertise.
You don’t need any experience to get into an entry-level apprentice or lead role in Tech Fleet. Simply apply to projects. Co-lads on projects select apprentices on projects.
Servant Service Leadership
Servant Service leadership is crucial for successful Agile teams.
All apprentices and co-leads are service leaders to each other.
Being a Servant Service leader means you're not telling people what to do or giving them the answer, or preventing them from failing. You are their guide and empowering them to find the answer on their own. You act in support of others' success and growth.
Co-Lead Servant Service Leaders
Co-leads are not managers or "bosses", they are not above anyone else on the team. Co-leads are contributors on the team, working on the same deliverables alongside apprentices, who lead and guide apprentices to success while learning themselves. Co-leads should be "on the front lines" in Tech Fleet. Project mentors outside of teams can help guide leads on advanced topics.
Apprentice Servant Service Leaders
Apprentices should jump right into the work and own work outcomes as early as possible. We want to avoid team dynamics where co-leads direct apprentices; rather, all on the team are a part of the team's success, and apprentices have great ideas and perspective just like co-leads. Everyone should be providing a psychologically safe environment to empower the apprentices and co-leads to succeed.
Learning by Doing
In school you’re taught how to deliver a perfect, finished end result. In practice product teams rarely see the opportunity for a "perfect end result" and achieve things through quick, continuous delivery of things, a bit at a time. Apprentices and leads learn to work on the most important things each week through their own determination. They demo to clients and feedback to adjust plans each week. In Tech Fleet it's about progress over perfection. How far can the team progress in 8 weeks? Tech Fleet apprenticeships allow you to build mixed sets of skills from different roles as you contribute. Projects allow you to work with cross-functional team members with different roles across Research, Design, Business Strategy, Development, and other roles. You can pitch in to any area you want during a project, whether it’s part of your role or not. This allows people to get exposed to new career paths and try them out while they’re learning their craft.
Team Structure
Project structure is set up on Tech Fleet projects so that there's redundancy in roles. Leads who are taking leadership positions for the first time can sign up with co-leads to help mentor them as a servant leader, or contribute to work alongside each other as equals.
All leads and co-leads are equals on teams. No lead is "above" another lead or co-lead. No lead is a "above" apprentices either. Apprentices and leads are on equal footing when it comes to work; everyone pitches in to what they commit to each week in sprint planning sessions, lead and apprentice both. On the team you are one collective team doing work together, and roles matter less when progressing as a whole. You will experience different things on different Tech Fleet projects, as it should be in the real world on Agile teams who fit Agile to their context.
Learn More about Team Positions and Team Roles
⛓️Commitment vs. Job Function vs. People on Teams🎢Team FunctionsHead to the Next Lesson
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