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Note: This article is co-written by Viktor Cessan and I. You can also find this article on his blog.

Have you ever felt like, despite tremendous investments of your time and energy trying to coach teams to overcome their challenges, you were just stuck? You knew your team had the potential to be a high performing one, but the same issues kept resurfacing over and over again?

Note: This article is co-written by Viktor Cessan and I. You can also find this article on his blog.

Have you ever wondered why so many organizations fail at building effective and high performing teams despite offering so much support in different ways e.g. by managing people, by managing the environment, and by coaching teams? You’re not alone. This is often something that frustrates teams, coaches, and managers.

In my years of working with software projects the one thing I have learned is that doing software projects is really hard. Probably zero projects I have been part of or heard of has delivered their value, kept the quality to a standard everyone is proud of, launched on time and had a team of happy people through all of it. Recently, though, I was part of project that did just that. An actual real life professional software project that was deemed successful by both the team and the stakeholders.

I work at Swedish real estate site Hemnet. We are a company of about 50 people with about 15 people working in product development — mostly developers plus a few designers. Being a small company means we are close to management and all fill a bit wider roles than in larger companies. The biggest challenges in our organization has been making priorities and following them through. This heavily influences where we have put most of our effort and where we have made the biggest lessons making, though I think most of it can be pretty broadly generalized.