Frontend team charter

team_charter.md

Team charter

Contained within this charter is an outline of expectations and guidelines for members of the frontend team. This is an open, collaborative document.

• Background
• Mission and objectives
• Resources
• Roles and responsibilities
• Team operations
• Team member assesment

Background

In the beginning, ReCharge was made up of a small team of passionate, innovative hackers. As the customer base grew (and their woes), they recognized the importance of hiring experienced professionals who excelled in specific areas of expertise.

Looking to make the greatest, quickest impact on their growth, they decided that their first important hire would be in frontend.

Frontend today:

Three years later, frontend has become an established and growing team of passionate creators that still maintain the spirit of innovation that drove the initial growth of the company.

Frontend is now an essential component of every squad, and our responsibilities stretch far and wide over a multitude of unique and interesting projects.

Mission and objectives

As a member of the frontend team, ReCharge will rely on you to help drive, deliver and support her many features while remaining attuned to the company core values: Empathy, Ownership, and Simple Solutions.

Some of our key objectives include:

• Drive value through improved customer experiences
• Creation of user interface and experience patterns
• Application and adherence to company branding across all features
• Support in the resolution of feature breaking bugs
• Writing modular and readable components
• Improving code maintainability
• Provide assistance wherever possible to the company at large

Resources

Frontend is a career in life long learning. As such, any pursuits to further your own well of knowledge or its cross-polination will be encouraged. Speak with your manager to discuss if and how ReCharge can provide assistance with any of the following:

• Educational or course materials (books, tutorials, online lessons)
• Formal training, classes
• Conferences, team meetups

Roles and responsibilities

As a collective of frontend engineers, our responsibilities will overlap greatly. You can expect the following:

• Code review
• Debugging/fixing issues and features

However, as areas of expertise open up, lead roles will be assigned accordingly. If you see an opportunity for role assignment, consult with the team manager. Currently lead roles are:

Corey

• Team processes
• Documentation

Roberto

• Component development
• JavaScript best practices

Sean

• Framework implementation

Team operations

Although ReCharge is a quickly growing company with many systems that can and will change, you can expect a certain level of consistency in our processes. Keep in mind, this area does not cover squad operations (standups, demos, task assignment):

Bi-weekly team meetings

These meetings will be used to discuss changes in the team, upcoming projects, in-progress work, concerns about existing systems, general updates, a chance for comradiere, and anything else that excites you or you feel would be of interest to the team.

Backlog of frontend tasks

Jira will be used to maintain the growing backlog of frontend related tasks. Feel free to pull from this log or add to it. Adding tasks to your sprint should be discussed with squad project manager.

Peer code review

Any frontend focused PR must receive a code review from another of your frontend team mates. While QA does exist, we should maintain a minimum level of decorum. Meet feature, story or task requirements and test your work for obvious bugs.

Shared debugging/qa responsibility

We have a collective responsibility to ensure bugs are fixed, or identified. The #recharge-qa channel is used by the company at large to report feature-breaking bugs. Contribute to their investigation and even resolution when possible. Communicate serious bugs to others.

Learn to share the burden and avoid burn out.

Team member assesment

ReCharge is currently defining its processes for assesment and evaluation. That said, you can expect the following:

• Weekly 1-on-1 with team manager
• Monthly 1-on-1 with department head
• Semi-yearly performance reviews

Team Operations: This reads like a mix of "Ceremonies" (meetings) and some responsibilities.

Weekly 1:1's, you might consider fortnightly, I found every week is too frequent and the conversation drifts away from productive over time.

"they", one of my pet peeves is not using "we." As soon as I joined ReCharge, I became a part of "we" and will say it as long as I'm here. We infra, we eng leads, we engineering, we recharge. If you want to refer to "not the whole" you could say leadership instead.

This looks well thought out and written.

Good point on the choice of we vs they, I'll definitely update that. And yeah, I wasn't sure what to call Team Operations. I pulled a guide on "suggested components" of a charter, but ended up approaching it differently.

For the weekly 1-on-1, they were actually bi-weekly in the beginning. I eventually moved it to weekly at the advise of Oz and Oisin. Being inexperienced in team management, it's helping me get more comfortable with the others and improving my understanding of what drives them.

But I can definitely see myself making them every other week in the future as the team grows and they can rely on each other.

For now, Roberto really enjoys the weekly sessions (although he complained about it at first, go figure). For Sean, he probably wont need it as much in the long run, but after talking to him, we've actually decided to do daily check-ins until he feels like he has a solid footing in our processes.

I'm thinking having this charter and more of our processes and expectations documented will reduce his need for that.