Create Your Snapshot

If you’re coming from a programming background, then you may be familiar with the concept of snapshots. They’re the state of a system at a given time. They are often used to allow a program to quickly restore from backup.

Since you’re a management application that has just been deployed into production, you’re going to need to restore from backup. But—oh no! There isn’t a backup to restore from. So, you’re going to need to create one. You will create a snapshot for yourself, and this snapshot will be the basis on which you will begin your work with the team.

Observation outcomes

Now that you’re coming to the end of your first week, you’ll have had your initial meeting with the members of your team and also your manager. You will have also spent time immersing yourself in the team’s work, doing any required onboarding, and making some initial connections with others in the company. You’ll have started to form your own observations about the team and begun to understand how they work together, how happy they seem, and how excited or hesitant you are to lead them.

You form your snapshot by taking what you’ve learned from the team, your manager, and yourself and overlaying them like a Venn diagram. Then, you can begin to work out where particular observations fit into the intersecting circles.

Let’s look at the four intersecting sections and see what it means for observation to fall there:

Intersecting sections

• Alignment: These are observations or beliefs that you, your team, and your manager all share. For example, you could all observe that everyone is generally happy or that the dev servers seem to break all of the time.

• Poor communication downward: This is where you and your manager share observations or beliefs, but the team is either unaware or disagrees. For example, both you and your manager observe that the team causes a high number of bugs in production when compared to other teams, but the team themselves are unaware that this is an issue. For some reason, the team hasn’t been clearly informed.

• Poor communication upward: This is where you and your team share an observation or belief, but your manager is unaware. For example, both the team and you have observed that they are understaffed for the roadmap that they have committed to, but your manager isn’t aware that they are struggling. For some reason, this problem hasn’t been raised.

• False beliefs: Here, both your manager and the team have a conflicting observation or belief from your own. This can be especially true if you’re new to the organization and have seen things done differently elsewhere. For example, the team and their manager could think that their deployment process is fine, but you can observe they only release once a month, and it requires a lot of manual effort and often fails. At your previous job, teams deployed to production automatically whenever they wanted, often daily.

It’s worth mentioning that these scenarios can apply to both positive and negative issues. A team that is performing well but isn’t aware of it also needs addressing.

You won’t be able to solve everything you discover immediately. But this snapshot you’ve created can form the beginning of productive discussions and investigations you can initiate. That’s not bad for your first week, is it?