Agile Team Tetris

Which Tetris Block represents you?

Need to build a Team — Learn from Tetris

Building a competitive team is a little bit like playing Tetris. In Tetris, there are various blocks falling from the sky with different properties. You need to combine them and use them in the best way as per their properties to win the level.

Unfortunately, in the real world, new team members don’t fall from the sky like Tetris blocks. But the challenge in building competitive teams is similar. You need to combine different people with different characters, skills, and properties to be successful.

This story will give an overview of different Tetris blocks and will compare them in a humorous way to actual skill schemes of people, their strengths and weaknesses, and how to appoint them to deliver their best as a team.

Additional gimmick: Perhaps you recognize yourself in one of these Tetris blocks ;-).

Before we start looking closer at the Tetris building blocks we define two dimensions — range and depth of skills. The range of skills consists of components or areas where a person has specific talents. The depth of skills defines how profound the knowledge in a particular area is. You can find an example from the programming world in Image 2.

In the range of skills, there are different headlines representing an area of a particular skill, e.g. Python programming or Project Management. The depth of skills represents different more detailed sub-areas of a particular skill. A senior developer in JavaScript for example will know about NodeJS, jQuery, and Frontend Development.

The “I” block is the only Tetris block that can clear 4 lines at once and can be a lifesaver in critical situations. However, if you use the block wrong and stack them on top of…

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