Back in 2016, Google conducted a large-scale study, dubbed “Project Aristotle,” into what makes for an effective team. They found that the greatest indicators of success for teams have less to do with how experienced individual members of the team are and more to do with their emotional awareness and the general feeling of ease and comfort that team members feel with each other.

Usually when I think about this study, it’s on a kind of theoretical level. However, working these last eight weeks with Brittany Lindgren, Dee Downs, Rachel Rohrbach, and Viet Tran, who collectively made up The Collab Lab’s team “TCL-17”, I was reminded that when you put the right kind of people together on the right team, well...that’s when the magic happens.

• Viet organized a meet-up before the cohort even began, laying the groundwork for the great team dynamics that came to be.
• Brittany took and shared notes in all of the meetings and always made sure that communication was clear and issues were clearly understood.
• Rachel’s PR reviews were on-point from day one, always quick to offer up both praise and suggestions.
• Dee regularly came up with the kind of out-of-the-box ideas that the team was able to spit-ball into creative gold. The whole team really gelled well together and supported each other the whole way, sharing their learnings along the way and helping each other out when they got stuck.

Working under the mentorship of Lauren Beatty, Chris Dopuch, and myself, the TCL-17 was able to build a ridiculously high-quality Smart Shopping Application in only two months. Every single one of their weekly demos were buttoned-up, practiced, and well-executed, culminating in their final demo, which felt like it gave Steve Jobs a run for his money. The team also really engaged well with our retrospective activities, and shared their frustrations as well as their triumphs openly for discussion. The retros helped the team to refine their already great team dynamic, and also keep in mind just how much of a great job they were doing!

The team was able to effectively give and take feedback, self-correct, and organize themselves into a well-oiled machine. The final two-weeks were open-ended, with a week of design in which the team did wonderful ideation and crafted all of the stories needed to take the app to the finish-line. This included creating and seeking out inspiration for their app designs, then condensing this down into a series of wireframe design mockups.

From there, the team was a storm of productivity, each taking on tickets of their own and delivering multiple iterations of design enhancement within the final week. Honestly, by the end of the program, some of us mentors found ourselves feeling almost guilty because we had so little mentoring to do.

The final product turned out great. The app is responsive, accessible, well-designed, and generally beautiful.

The team’s latest product can be found here.

Whoever ends up hiring these developers will be extremely lucky!