The rethink space team was five people strong. We wanted to have a team that was big enough to handle the volume of change we wanted to make, but small enough to be nimble and flexible.
The rethink space team was comprised of team members with very different expertise and different views of the space around them. The team members were from different functional groups and fall in different age brackets.
The team was set up around the mindset of empathy and transparency. Change is hard for everyone and the only way to make positive change is to be empathetic and transparent to the people it is going to affect. The rethink space team also placed a high value on over communicating and on making the project fun for everyone involved. We also trained ourselves to question everything and to relentlessly pursue what we thought was organizationally valuable.
Team members did not have to have a specific commitment in terms of the number of hours they were expected to dedicate to the project. As a team member you could commit to what you can do, when you can do it. However, if you did commit to something, we were responsible for seeing it through.
The project involved one stand in meeting every week. Because of our team size and setup, we were able to have regular check-ins and ad-hoc meetings multiple times during the week.
Our project management was very visual - any artifacts like spreadsheets and reports that could fit in a cabinet or a drawer were not allowed. Our most important project management tools were embedded in plain sight. Our team room and included a large whiteboard depicting where we were in the process, a large calendar to denote our deliverable dates and timelines and to-do lists written on large sticky pads. We did not have a dedicated project manager on the team and everything we did from a project management perspective, was only to aid our process and move the project forward.
While we did technically have a team lead, the project leadership was shared. Different team members took leadership during different phases of the project. For such a flexible team with such an ambiguous task, the project leadership needed to be running in the background and so we did not have any hierarchy in the team.