Do you have the right people, process, and product?
In my consulting practice I help companies create and deliver successful software products by “up-levelling” their people, processes, and products. Breaking the three areas down, here are the basic rationales for each section:
People - ultimately the talent you hire will determine what can be built
Process - how your people work together in teams to create products
Product - a valuable solution to a critical customer pain
If any of these three aspects is lacking, your business will not succeed. I would also add that the degree to which your business can be successful will be limited by the weakest of these three areas. Therefore it’s important to take an honest look at your organization and assess where you need the most help. Today let’s look deeper into what goes into the people component.
The right people
As expected, the quality of people you hire will limit the types of products you can build, the quality of your product, and your timeline to release to market. On its face, this seems like a trivial and very obvious statement, but in practice I find most companies avoid intentionally choosing a strategy that fits their business model. Eventually this becomes a problem if the company cannot deliver against expectations or needs to pivot or change their business model, and the current employees are not suited for the new direction. As I mentioned in other blog posts, change is hard and people with other options will leave if they feel threatened. I’ve seen numbers that suggest hiring a single new employee costs as much as $60k. It’s far more efficient to plan on the type of people you need before you start your business.
There are several approaches to hiring people or “talent management” that will have a large effect on your company’s success. I’ve seen companies pursue cheaper talent to keep costs down, only to find they have created a product that does not perform as expected and cannot ever be released into the market. These people are cheaper on the market but can’t complete the tasks or they take too long to learn new concepts. On the other side I have seen companies hire the best talent but be unable to keep them around long enough to release a product. These top performers always want new challenges and are not interested in the long term commitment required to release a major product. This problem is not limited to engineers either, as I have seen similar problems with product managers, sales people, quality engineers, marketing experts, etc. In all cases, the wrong people costs a lot of money and time.
The first step
A lot goes into determining if you have the right people for the work you need done and how you manage them to success, but I suggest that you start with setting expectations. Managing people is much easier if everyone has agreed upon priorities and goals up front. Without a goal set, it’s impossible to know if you were successful. The first thing I do when I work with people is to understand the current goals and then benchmark the current state. If we do not have clear goals then our work starts with goal setting. It may be the case that the first goal we establish is to actually set goals, and this is totally fine. The exercise of setting a goal is a great opportunity to see how the team interacts, which helps inform the “process” and “product” aspect we will look at in other blog posts.