Team Dynamics and
Soft Skills for Developers

Whether you've learned software development at a school, bootcamp, online, or are entirely self-taught, there is one key aspect to being a developer that you were likely never trained on: how to deal with people on a team.

Developers are also team members and, eventually, may become managers. Yet, team dynamics and soft skills are never taught to coders.

This course aims to fix that.

How Will This Course Help Me?

As a coder, designer, and manager for 25 years, I can say that cohesive teams make the best software, and coders who are good communicators and positively contribute to team cohesiveness are rare and extremely valuable.

This course will help you make those positive contributions. Along the way you will enjoy your job more, communicate more effectively, build better software, and maybe even show yourself to be someone who can manage others (if that's what you want to do).

My goal is to help you to better understand the developers, designers, and managers you work with every day. I provide you a framework to help interact with your team members in the way that maximizes your chances of getting a positive outcome from that interaction.

We accomplish that goal by examining two key topics:

Team Dynamics

A team is a collection of people, and team dynamics is how those people interact with one another.

Sometimes coders like to talk as if they're purely analytical, logical beings, not emotional. But that's false. Coders are people. People have various needs and many inputs that determine the output you get from them.

We will look at the kinds of "states" that individual team members can be in (I don't say "types" because people can change). Understanding those states helps us to adjust the way we present information to ease the path to a good outcome.

We also look at the basic human needs that everyone needs to be provided in order to have good interactions. Things like dignity, agency, and respect.

Soft Skills

Soft skills are the particular skills that lead to clarity between team members and good team dynamics.

Things like empathy, good communication, and conflict management.

In this course we'll discuss concrete, actionable things you can do that improve your soft skills, improving your day-to-day interactions with your team members.

Communication Skills Are A Game Changer

Poor communication between team members is an underreported reason for software development failures, scope creep, and bugs.

When you learn to communicate better, you improve the quality of your team and the software it produces.

You'll learn how to communicate in the specific areas of dev team communication. Things like DMs, e-mail, code reviews, and even your code itself.

Managing Developers Is Its Own Skill

No one tells you how to manage devs. Yet you may be asked to do just that (or already are!).

There are unique challenges to managing developers and you'll learn techniques to deal with those challenges.

You'll learn how to motivate devs, how to deal with crisis (like major bugs), and how to help developers grow as coders and team members.

...oh, and we'll talk about managing yourself as well. In particular your view of yourself, and how that can help you travel through your career with a healthy sense of your own value.

The Curriculum

The course contains 5 hours of video and is split into 11 modules.

Here's the full curriculum (select a module for more details):

Watch Some Tips For Free

Still not sure if the course is for you? I put some of my favorite tips from the course for free on my YouTube channel. So if you aren't sure, start watching!

FAQs