Two Ways to Play Volleyball

There are two ways to play volleyball.

I think this distinction exists in many sports (lacrosse, baseball etc.), but it’s painfully obvious in volleyball. Are points scored on great plays or mistakes? Is your team getting a solid spike on most returns? Is your entire team playing hard to win? The vast majority of times I play volleyball we’re just trying to keep the ball in the air (still a great time), but a hand full of times I’ve been a part of truly competitive games.

I think about this distinction in other team contexts all the time. Are we playing competitively, or are we just trying to keep the ball in the air?

One example is when I worked on an “unnamed” software engineering team. Individually we were all talented software engineers, but we were undoubtably just keeping the ball in the air. We constantly battled bugs, we couldn’t properly track metrics due to logging inconsistencies, and it was hard to make forward progress without taking a few steps back. Overal, our effort was defined by our mistakes over our successes–our fumbled balls over our collaborative spikes.

A combination of strict eningeering guidelines, thorough testing procedures, and firings made us a competitive team, but it took time. Time that we didn’t necessarily have as as a company.

To be a competitive software company, your engineering team must be playing competitive volleyball with no exceptions. This might seem obvious, but the metaphor crystalized it for me. The team should be defined by building extrodinary experiences and launching new functionality at high velocity. Mistakes will happen, but that must be outside the norm.

So how do you build a competitive volleyball/software team? Skill, coordination, and clear direction.

Boiled down even further, you need great players and great leadership. Without both, you’ll probably find yourself keeping the ball in the air until you mistake yourself into oblivion. If you’re doing anything with a team where the stakes are higher than a lighthearted volleyball game on pier 17, play to win. Otherwise improve the team fast or accept mediocrity.