"But the best teams I've encountered have one important thing in common: their team structure and processes cover a full range of distinct competencies necessary for success"
About this Quote
Jesse James Garrett points to a simple but demanding truth: great outcomes come from teams that are deliberately designed to match the work. It is not enough to gather bright people and hope for chemistry. Success requires a structure and set of practices that collectively cover all the distinct competencies the problem demands, with clarity about who does what and how work flows between them.
Coming from a pioneer of user experience, the insight resonates with his broader view that making anything people value is multidisciplinary. Strategy defines why a product should exist. Scope translates intent into requirements. Structure gives the information and interactions coherence. Skeleton refines layouts and flows. Surface brings form and tone. Research grounds decisions in evidence. Engineering realizes the design. Operations, analytics, content, accessibility, security, and marketing sustain and scale it. When any one of these is missing or marginalized, gaps open that no single superstar can fill.
Coverage is not about building a large team, but a complete one. Individuals can be T-shaped, with depth in one area and literacy in adjacent ones, but the ensemble must still add up to the full range. Processes then make that coverage real: discovery rituals that connect strategy to evidence; decision rights that prevent thrash; shared artifacts that reduce translation loss; critiques, code reviews, and testing that expose assumptions early; feedback loops that tie shipped changes back to outcomes.
Teams that ignore a necessary competency pay later in rework, technical debt, compliance surprises, or products that are usable but undesirable, desirable but unbuildable, or buildable but unsellable. Teams that align structure and process to the work move faster with fewer blind spots, because ambiguity has a home, handoffs have context, and quality is everyone’s job. The lesson is organizational design as product design: build the team system to reflect the complexity of the problem, and sustained success becomes a repeatable habit rather than a lucky break.
Coming from a pioneer of user experience, the insight resonates with his broader view that making anything people value is multidisciplinary. Strategy defines why a product should exist. Scope translates intent into requirements. Structure gives the information and interactions coherence. Skeleton refines layouts and flows. Surface brings form and tone. Research grounds decisions in evidence. Engineering realizes the design. Operations, analytics, content, accessibility, security, and marketing sustain and scale it. When any one of these is missing or marginalized, gaps open that no single superstar can fill.
Coverage is not about building a large team, but a complete one. Individuals can be T-shaped, with depth in one area and literacy in adjacent ones, but the ensemble must still add up to the full range. Processes then make that coverage real: discovery rituals that connect strategy to evidence; decision rights that prevent thrash; shared artifacts that reduce translation loss; critiques, code reviews, and testing that expose assumptions early; feedback loops that tie shipped changes back to outcomes.
Teams that ignore a necessary competency pay later in rework, technical debt, compliance surprises, or products that are usable but undesirable, desirable but unbuildable, or buildable but unsellable. Teams that align structure and process to the work move faster with fewer blind spots, because ambiguity has a home, handoffs have context, and quality is everyone’s job. The lesson is organizational design as product design: build the team system to reflect the complexity of the problem, and sustained success becomes a repeatable habit rather than a lucky break.
Quote Details
| Topic | Team Building |
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