What is a team?

team (noun) – two or more people working together.

Oxford English Dictionary

Two or more people working together. If you aren’t working together, then by definition, you aren’t a team.

That begs the question: what does “working together” mean? Here are some things that are (usually) necessary but not sufficient for “working together”:

• Talking to each other regularly
• Working on the same codebase
• Reviewing each other’s code
• Attending the same standup
• Using the same project board

It’s hard to “work together” without doing those things, but doing those things alone doesn’t necessarily mean you’re working together.

So here’s my definition: working together means working on the same workstream at the same time. If you aren’t doing that, you can call yourselves a team, but that doesn’t make it true.