Exceptional teams build tools

Working in and leading multiple teams I see a pattern so fundamental that it can't be ignored, the making of tools. The ability to build complicated tools sets us apart from all animals, I'm not thinking about the usage of items as trivial tools but the huge amounts of effort put into construction of advanced tools. The abstract thinking and relentless effort to create tools that enable something that wasn't possible before is one of the key markers of great teams.

I have previously looked at modern software development as the task of building tools for others, for any team to achieve effectiveness it is important to not be come a producer of features. The need of features is insatiable to the point where building products with features removed has become a feature. Any long term thinking team must look beyond features and build capabilities that enable their customers can use for purposes they themselves could not imagine, to solve problems without the team jumping in to help. For many teams in software development that means that the focus must not be to build the thing, but to build the thing that can build the thing. That way a small group of people can leverage the creativity of countless other minds to create the amazing things.

This is of course hard as hell, which is why most teams avoid the painful process of failing a hundred times to advance tooling beyond what is very often in software readily available. The gain is the intangible benefit of an efficient solution to what might be an abstract problem or a seemingly minute improvement in efficiency. When succeeding the satisfaction is enormous and if those advances can be passed to the rest of the world it advances humanity.

A word of caution: A common fallacy that I have observed is that many persons tend to jump to the conclusion that having great tools is what makes an exceptional team. But it's not. If you give great tools to someone else you can at best help them to improve to a level of high performance, if the ambition is exceptional, the team needs to use all the best tools that they can get to make even better tools. Then they use these tools to do things exceptionally well.

A Nokia N95, perhaps one of the most advanced mobile phones of its time. It had a ton of features yet it quickly was obsoleted when the competition started allowing their customers building their own tools into their phones.