Immediately following grad school (I studied Philosophy at SUNY Binghamton), I spent a year in the City of Binghamton, working as an AmeriCorps community organizer.

It was a tough job. I commuted that year exclusively by bicycle. The pay for an AmeriCorps organizer at that time was the median income of the community where we worked, which for the First Ward / North Side neighborhood was $11,000 for the year. There was a mass shooting.

It’s funny how even now, a full decade into working in the technology sector, I am still finding things from my pre-tech professional life to be valuable, and sort of echoing forward to shine some interesting light onto my present work.

Part of the AmeriCorps training was this absolutely monstrous binder, full of pages and pages of notes and printed out slide decks and procedures, and some theory and best practice, and maybe also some political cartoons, if my memory serves.

In that binder was a primer on Tuckman’s Stages , which are a mental model to the way that groups evolve and shift over time – through predictable, identifiable, and independently understand-able stages of existence. Forming, Norming, Storming and Performing.

(They’re well named, you don’t really need to read the Wikipedia page to grok the rest of this post – but it is a good read!)

At the time, my professional focus was a program called the Neighborhood Assemblies, an effort of City Hall to create some direct democracy inputs into the budgeting and policy processes for the city, and being able to see the different assemblies through this lens was very helpful – especially, for me, seeing how a certain amount of tension, and conflict, could be a productive ingredient in the overall recipe of a successful group’s navigating its way through Storming toward Performing.

Since then – through WordPress.com, Akismet, WooCommerce, dbt Labs, and now Disney Streaming, having this lens through which to understand how a team, or a division, or a whole company, is generally doing, has been really surprisingly helpful for me.

It’s a nice lens because it offers a certain capacity to zoom in and out – a particular team may be highly performing even within a larger department which is possibly still norming or storming. I have found it helpful to help frame groups as small as two – especially since, as some of you have heard me say to an annoying degree, teams don’t have relationships, people do.

I’ve found these stages to be really powerful in conjunction with some of the insights from Larson’s An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management, where we can place a lot of how he describes organizational disruption and its causes squarely into the ways and whys teams and departments degrade from Performing back into the earlier stages.

If you work in Product, this can be a really valuable mental model, and I’d recommend leaning into it, regardless of your level or area of remit. If you work cross functionally or in a role that depends on multiple teams working together, and having an understanding of how to understand and improve organizations could be valuable for you, then you too could benefit from learning a bit more here.

Not all lessons echo forward through a whole career, and this might not be a tool that’s valuable for you for the next twenty years – but it’s been really helpful for me, to understand the teams I work with (and on!) and to help communicate with those teams and their leaders how they might move forward toward that coveted Performance stage!

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