The team I built before I fixed anything

Years ago I wrote about getting people to believe in your vision. That post ended with Cambridge University Press handing me a new multi-million-pound project, Higher Education, and a promise that I would tell you how I made it work.

This is that story. I built the best team of my career, and we changed how we delivered. It worked, while it lasted.

Before I changed a single thing about our process, I built the team. Everything that came later, the flow, the metrics, the way we shipped, stood on that foundation. Get the team wrong and no amount of tooling saves you.

So I want to start where it actually started. With people.

Small on purpose

I wanted a small team. Three of us at the core, not fifteen.

That was a deliberate choice, not a comfort preference. A small team has fewer hand-offs, less context switching, and shorter feedback loops. When three people share a goal, you do not need a meeting to stay aligned. You turn your chair around.

I would spend the next year fighting queues, waiting, and coordination cost in our delivery pipeline. A small team was the first move against all three. Fewer people meant fewer places for work to sit and wait.

Big teams feel safe to the business. They look like capacity. In practice they often deliver slower, because the cost of keeping everyone aligned grows faster than the output.

Surround yourself with believers

I did not get the role alone.

My previous team lead was instrumental. He drew my proposed architecture and approach in front of our director. He did not want to know every detail, and he did not need to. He needed to know it would scale and serve the business for years to come, and he backed that judgement publicly.

That backing gave me autonomy and agency. I have written before about what happens when a leader fights for their team. This was that, applied to me. Trust given early, in the open, in front of the people who could have blocked us.

Hiring the realist

I needed a right-hand person.

We did the traditional interview questions. What I really wanted was someone who would care as much as I did. Someone who would share their opinion openly, who understood the situation, and who put the team first.

I got exactly that.

We had different personalities, and that made everything better. If I was the visionary, he was the realist. I would chase what could be, and he would tell me what would actually hold up on a Tuesday afternoon under real load. A team needs both.

Our way of working

Our team was good because we worked the same way.

We had the right people, the right mix of experience, and a team charter we all abided by. The charter was ours. Not the company's. Not a copy of another team's. Ours.

That distinction mattered more than it sounds. When a way of working is handed to you, you follow it. When you write it together, you own it. People defend what they helped build.

This is the idea I explored in creating a product culture at Cambridge University Press: people create a product culture, not processes. That post argued the principle. This series shows what it costs to protect those people when the organisation stops seeing them as people.

The worldview underneath

My thinking had shifted by this point.

I had stopped caring about burndown charts and the rest of the ceremony scoreboard. Reading Jeff Patton and Marty Cagan reframed it for me. Patton taught me to slice work thin and map it to real outcomes. Cagan taught me to chase outcomes over output, and to give empowered teams real problems instead of feature lists.

That worldview seeded a practice I will come back to later in this series: every ticket is a three. Stop estimating. Slice small. Count what you actually ship. For now it is enough to say the team agreed on a simple belief. We measured value and flow, not activity.

The foundation was set. The right people, real trust, a charter we owned, and a shared idea of what good looked like.

Then I turned to the thing that was quietly hurting us. The pipeline.