What Actually Makes an Engineering Team Effective

Mon, 18 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I spent the early part of my career believing that team effectiveness was mostly about talent. Get the best engineers, give them interesting problems, and get out of the way. It’s an appealing theory, and it’s wrong, or at least, it’s missing the most important part.

Google’s Project Aristotle studied 180 teams and ran 35 statistical models to find what made some teams effective and others not. The finding that surprised everyone, including Google, was that who was on the team mattered far less than how the team worked together. Individual talent, seniority, even team size, none of these were the primary drivers.

Team-Effectiveness on guy@secdev.uk

What Actually Makes an Engineering Team Effective