Most of the folks reading this are members of a “team” of some kind…but how do you know? What makes you feel like you’re a member of a team, and not just a collection of individuals off doing their own thing? Happy hours, offsites, occasional lunches and water-cooler conversation - all of these things can contribute to a feeling of “teamliness”. In keeping with today’s inDay theme of “Belonging” I’d like to talk about something _Ryan Dohertyinstituted for a team _ I’m on that has been super-helpful in this regard. It’s pretty straightforward, so I’ll give step-by-step instructions.

Here’s how it works:

  1. Create a “parking lot” slack channel. You can name it whatever you like - we went with #$team_name-parking-lot. This channel will serve as a durable backlog of conversation topics.

  2. Any time you come across something you think your teammates might be interested in, drop it the parking lot. This might be a new feature of a framework you’re using, a novel/interesting bit of code you came across (or wrote!), a tips-n-tricks article you found helpful, etc.

  3. Schedule a weekly meeting (30 minutes should be sufficient, an hour is probably too long). In this meeting you’ll walk through the parking lot. Typically - but not always - the person who originally posted a given topic will spend a few minutes talking about it; what it is, why they thought it was interesting/relevant, etc.

  4. After the meeting put a nice long line of emojis in the channel as a placeholder so you know where to start the next meeting.

…and that’s it! (See, I told you this was straightforward.)

A couple of finer points “below the fold”:

We intentionally left managers off of the invite for this meeting. This isn’t because we’re assholes - managers are people, too - but because managers tend to change the dynamic of a meeting, sometimes in subtle ways. Related to the above: this is not the place for pass-downs, (Jira) backlog grooming, status updates, sprint planning, etc. You already have plenty of your calendar dedicated to those activities…do them then, not now. This is a good place to try and level-set folks on tech topics. In our case, we were all relatively inexperienced with parts of the stack we were using (specifically, Ember). The parking lot was invaluable for helping us all “mutually bootstrap”, so to speak. Similarly, not all code is created equal. Sometimes an RB could bear a little in-person explanation for the poor bastards who will one day have to revert your commit. This is a great forum for that.

tl;dr: Use this time wisely. An investment in your team is one of the best investments you’re likely to make.