If you want your team to be efficient, you will have to nurture and grow your own talent. It may be very seductive to hire an on- or an off-shore software development shop to quickly build out your product but it’s a slippery slope if you are planning to build a proper company and not just ride the hype wave and hope you will sell out soon.

Let’s see what are the advantages of an external team:

  • You don’t have to deal with finding, hiring and teaching people
  • You don’t have to inspire and manage them

What are the disadvantages:

  • The external team will never buy in into your idea
  • You won’t be able to motivate them
  • You will never be in full control of the product that’s being built

For people to progress quicker they must feel safe. In order to create a safe environment, you have to be transparent with them - transparent about the company, the product, your plans and their career path.

The career path transparency may be the most crucial part of the safety equation.

Team Dynamics

A-Players don’t want to work with B-Players and may even leave your company if some B-Players will sneak in. The main problem with the B-Players is their insecurity. They will do everything to hire people who are less smart than them, what can cause a complete deterioration of the company.

A team of A-Players will work as a well-oiled machine. Adding a B-Player to it is like throwing a stone into the working engine. The engine will slow down at first, start rattling at second and break at last.

Productivity

Different people thrive in different environments. Some people work better in a totally relaxed atmosphere whereas the others are more productive under pressure.

Having different personalities on the team will help you keep your productivity high at all times.

Growing Talent

Growing your own talent may be rewarding but it’s also very costly. Sometimes it’s unavoidable though.

If you’re building your new team and bootstrapping you won’t have enough money to hire the senior people you may need. Growing your own talent is one possible way to go.

Advantages of growing your own talent:

  • You will be able to grow talent that breathes your culture
  • They will grow together with your company and have an emotional bond to it
  • They will not just work for money but feel as part of the family

Disadvantages of growing your own talent:

  • It takes time
  • It’s rather expensive
  • The inexperienced people will inevitable waste the time of your more experienced team members
  • They won’t immediately contribute to the success of your company
  • Some people may leave your company immediately after they started to get some knowledge. You have to think about smart ways to incentivise them to stay

Progression Framework

As we already stated above to create a safe environment, where people can grow professionally and personally, we need to establish a clear growth path that people can follow to get to new heights of their careers.

This progression framework has to outline the work that has to be performed and knowledge that has to be gained to get to the next steps in our career.

Your progression framework has to be supported by the day-to-day work and the tasks that are assigned to your junior team members by the senior ones. Their progression has to be tracked and aligned. Otherwise you will run into the misunderstandings of expectations and won’t be able to properly measure the performance of your team members.

You have to set and track both short-, mid- and long-term goals for your team members and thus perform short-, mid- and long-term performance reviews and interviews with them. Use the weekly one-on-ones, monthly and quarterly performance reviews. The weekly one-on-ones are mainly for your team member to ask questions, raise concerns and propose improvements.

During the monthly and quarterly reviews, your senior team members should not only provide the feedback on the current state of the progression but also outline the steps that has to be taken to continue to progress successfully or get back on track if the progression has been derailed. They also have to reevaluate and potentially to set new goals that have to be achieved until the next performance review.