Your First Team Breaks You Before They Build You

Your first team is your brutal mirror, your hardest teachers, and your biggest sponsors. Here’s what mine taught me at Yahoo.

Your first team isn’t here to make you comfortable.

They test you.
They expose your weaknesses.
They reflect every crack in your leadership back at you.

And they don’t wait—they do it in real-time. Every mistake you make becomes their burden to carry.

When I led my first team—six engineers working on Yahoo’s platform team—I thought I was ready. On paper, I…