Team Building as Magic

I've recently been tasked with staffing our group back up to it's fullest potential. Recent comings and goings have left us with 2 staffed and 4 open positions, not including mine. As I've been wading through resumes and talking with candidates something struck me: building a team from near-scratch like this has a great resemblance to the strategic card games Magic and Pokemon. To start a game in one of these, you sort through your collection of cards (offensive, defensive, special use, environmental, etc.) and build a game deck of 15 or so cards that you play that game with. Part of the gameplay is luck, but far more of it is strategy, hinging on how you pick what cards go in your deck and how you play those cards as the game progresses.

Building a team for success at work is no different. I have dozens of likely candidates as potential choices, each with their technical and personal strengths and weaknesses. The team that I put together will determine our success over the coming months and years. In addition to core technical competencies, I'm putting emphasis on professional developer talents such as testing and agile team experiences, and I'm banking that that emphasis will serve us well. Other traits I'm finding valuable are a passion for craft, meaning I want people to be passionate about doing things the right way (over just getting them done), and people skills over technical skills, meaning that I don't want an uber-guru who keeps everyone around themselves ticked-off or can't communicate. Ideally you want someone with all these skills and all the ideal traits in one package (or even a whole team of folks like that), but those folks as rare and hard to find as heros in Magic. I think a solid heterogeneous team with just the right blend of skills in a team that can work well together is far more realistic and achievable.

I'm off to build my winning deck.