The Customer Token Handler project offers an ironic illustration of Tuckman’s stages of group development – specifically how a highly skilled group can easily fail due to team dynamics. At a major technology company in Southeast Asia, an experiment in temporary team formation produced an unexpected lesson in ineffectiveness.

The setup appeared logical on paper. Three seasoned technical leads from Mobile, Homepage, and Supply Extranet domains would combine their expertise for two sprints in a temporary 3 person team. The mission: create a unified token handling library for customer authentication. Experience suggested their combined expertise would accelerate delivery.

Hour one revealed the fundamental flaw. The Homepage lead populated JIRA with exhaustive tickets. The Mobile lead covered whiteboards with sticky note tasks. The Supply Extranet lead, not one for the bureaucracy of planning, just started writing code. Three experts, three methodologies, zero progress. No forming, straight to storming, never reaching norming.

The two-sprint experiment dissolved afterwards without a working solution. The project appeared destined for failure until one technical lead took ownership. Working alone, they completed the token handling library in another two weeks – accomplishing more solo than the combined team had achieved together in double that time.

This outcome challenged conventional wisdom about collaborative development. While the three-person team generated extensive documentation, diagrams, and partial implementations, they never established the shared context necessary for effective collaboration. The eventual solo success demonstrated how reduced coordination overhead can sometimes accelerate delivery, did we end up with a better product from the solo lead? probably not, but its a working one at least that we can iterate on.

The Customer Token Handler story reshaped our approach to temporary team formation. It highlighted how Tuckman’s stages cannot be shortcuts, even with experienced technical leaders. Teams should be long lived to be effective.

We must never look at Engineering teams like a scheduling problem to solve, they are people, they have the same flaws and quirks as people do, we need to acknowledge them beyond their IC number in order to create winning teams.