A team is a group of individuals working together to achieve a goal. However, a tribe (in anthropology) is a human social group. That is: a group of people who interact with one another, share similar characteristics and have a collective sense of unity, and identity.
As already explained in
several previous blog posts, all the people that worked in the tech/dev department at The Motion formed a cohesive team, called the Honey Badger Team, with shared goals and a common mindset.
The Motion was a typical example of an early stage startup: the platform itself was working well, but we weren't able to reach the product market fit, at least with the initial idea. This led to, the company, the product, and the business pivoting several times in the search for monetization. And although the current model seems to work better than the initial one, the result of all these changes, was that part of the team, including myself, gradually left. Motivation for leaving was different for each engineer, but in my case, I had already fostered a great team and had helped build a scalable platform, and was now looking for a new challenge. And I found that new challenge I was looking for at
Nextatil, leading the agile retail revolution, but that is another story for a different blog post.
The important thing was that The Honey Badger Team was no more, and at first, this made me sad. It was one of the cons about changing jobs.
However, (and I'm really not sure about how this happened), we seemed to have created a social group. With our mindset. With our shared history. With our way of working.
And we evolved from being a team to forming a
tribe. A tribe with our own communication channels, our jokes, our standard way of solving problems. With a grown/agile mindset, aligned with the XP/DevOps values and practices.
It is incredible, but we are now spread over more than five different startups, and we still all thinking about how to spread our values, our way of thinking, our way of solving problems. Sharing knowledge, sharing values, sharing solutions.
So it's clear that instead of losing a great team, what really happened was I got a tribe instead. :)
Currently, we have two telegram channels, which we use to communicate or to obtain great solutions to any problem that we share.
Moreover, we are thinking about creating our invitational conference: the “Tejones Conf", an event for ourselves, our families and friends of us.
If we aren't a tribe, I don’t know what we are.
References
The history of the Honey Badger team:
Blogs from other other Honey Badger tribe members:
