Three main roles in IT
In a successful IT company there are main roles, without which the correct and
The first role is product manager.This is the person who manages the concept, clearly sees what “pain” the product solves for the client and what value it brings. It answers the question “Why are we doing this?” This person must have developed soft skills (from English “soft skills” - “High-tech”) in order to sense the needs of clients, build communication with the development, sales and marketing team. Such skills are difficult to measure, but there are a number of practices that help to apply them and create the product the client needs as a result: knowledge in the field of user eXperience (UX), analytics, positioning of what has been done, as well as ways to study the target audience and skills in conducting experiments.
User eXperience “User experience, interaction experience”are the user's perceptions and responses resulting from the use and/or intended use of a product, system or service.
User experience includes all emotions, beliefs,preferences, sensations, physical and psychological reactions of the user, behavior and achievements that arise before, during and after using the system.
The second person is the chief engineer or, in another way,CTO is CTO. This person answers the question "How will we do this?" He must have programming and management skills - if the company grows, his role will gradually shift: he will work less with his hands and manage the team more. Knowing the IT landscape as a whole and understanding what technologies, specialists, algorithms, approaches are needed to complete a specific task will come in handy. He should have a broad IT outlook, mandatory for this position even at the entrance.
The third person is responsible for marketing andsales. At the beginning of the path, these areas can be combined. Such a specialist answers the question "To whom and how will we sell our solution?" The set of skills here varies depending on whether it works in the B2C or B2B market. In B2B, first of all, experience and a “full hand” in this area are needed. A set of special skills is even less important than experience.
Key Development Steps
As a rule, at the start the company already hashypotheses about what “pains” and problems of a potential client the product should solve. When a company already has a product, it is important to set up processes in marketing and sales in order to reach a potential client, generate leads - pre-interested customers, process them and convert them into an order.
The next stage is no less important - the implementation of the product within the client’s company, since we are talking about the B2B market.
After that comes the “happiness management” of the client: technical support, updates and, possibly, the satisfaction of the following “pains” due to the sale of additional services, we are talking about how to work with a client and how to keep him, as well as receive his money longer.
Drawing up technical specifications: how not to confuse the roles
Product manager responsible for overall development.the product and its vision, and also strives to ensure that the product satisfies not only the tasks of one specific customer, but also solves a number of similar problems and could be scaled subsequently - sold to many other customers. Such specialists study customers, conduct various experiments, form a vision of product development. After that, they turn this vision into a sequence of steps to create a product - roadmap.
Technology Roadmap “Technological roadmap”— short-term or long-term release planmanufacturer of any product. Most often, this is a new version or development of an already known product, changes in which consumers are waiting for. A technology roadmap may contain the tools, approaches, or paths needed to achieve the milestones.
Project manager leads a project with a specificcustomer and makes sure that your product as much as possible meets the unique need of a particular client. His work begins with pre-sale, he manages the design of the project, the preparation of technical specifications, leads the design work step by step and is responsible for the final implementation.
Depending on the size of the project at this stageadditional roles may appear, such as a business and systems analyst. These people study the project plan in detail, work out the documentation with which the developers work. The development department, in turn, understands which architecture or systems to respond to the challenges posed by managers and customers.
Next step: “managing customer happiness”
At this stage there are several levels:
- The first is a standard service package, withinwhich you provide the SLA (Service Level Agreement), that is, the service level agreement. It is important to note in it how quickly you respond to a client’s request, how much services you can provide him, what is included in this list of services. Usually this is clearly regulated and described.
- The second option: individual conditions - depending on the needs of the client, the company can provide him with a separate manager, an additional pool of hours or work performed, a set of discounts for a large number of orders. In this case, the conditions are customized individually and, as a rule, you need to appoint a key account manager who will lead the process of working with a specific client.
Ways to eliminate development errors
1. The most important thing is not to make mistakes in people when hiring. In software development, the only important, worthwhile and beneficial asset is employees. And at first, the main thing is to choose them correctly.
How to properly assemble a team for an IT company
- In the first stages of the selection you need to answer yourselfhonestly to the question whether you have the necessary competencies to assess the professionalism of the candidate. Can you rely on the recommendations of friends, do they have competencies in your business? When selecting, you need to separate emotions and facts - to hire a charming, but incompetent employee will be a mistake.
- Make the feedback loop in your workflows as short as possible. You don’t have to wait a month to decide if an employee is right for your company.
A) If you have comments about an employee’s performance and you understand that you expected different results from him, let him know as soon as possible.
C) It is important that employees are able to accept feedback and respond to it. The absence of this makes it clear that in the future this person will not work comfortably and productively.
- Look at professional markers, indicators that are important in a particular area, to understand whether an employee is achieving his goals.
The company must have a system set upperformance management. At the initial stages of building a business, it can be in the head of the manager in order to clearly and impartially assess how well the team is coping with tasks. Use ready-made solutions if you identify organizational barriers, competency deficits, low motivation and engagement, and other factors affecting employee productivity. Thus, with the help of the “TalentTech.Goals” solution, you can manage the performance of employees, not just recording the fact of achieving a goal, but understanding for what reasons the goal was achieved or not.
2. Insufficient attention to employee development, their personal growth, involvement, emotional state, productivity. Since this is your main tool, you need to be very proactive in ensuring that your staff is in the most comfortable and productive state possible. Technology helps with employee adaptation and engagement: for example, quick pulse surveys allow you to understand the mood of the team, identify “pain points” and conduct analytics to correct processes and increase work efficiency.
3. Product error.There is a risk of making a product that does not fully meet your customer's needs. A flexible approach and iterativeness will help here - regular intermediate analysis of what has been done, changes in the process, so that the team at each stage is on the same wavelength with the customer’s ideas and clearly understands what goal it is pursuing.
4. Incorrect technical solutions and accumulation of technical debt. These may be solutions that function perfectly now, but interfere with future development. For example, you need to send a letter to the client during registration, but the text is written in the program code and only a programmer can make changes to it. When you develop software, there is always a choice - to make quickly or efficiently so that it does not bring problems in the future. As a rule, a compromise is chosen, and no matter how you conduct the development, technical debt accumulates. It is important to manage this process and eliminate inaccuracies in time. If we forget about these nuances, then in a few years the company may become incompetent.
5. Ignoring quality management issues.Quality is what keeps customers coming back to you again and again. Lack of attention in this matter will result in labor costs and loss of money in the future. For example, you didn’t write tests in code, which saved an hour of time. After a month of making improvements, you will spend a day making sure everything is working correctly.
Tasks from project and product managers firstend up in a backlog - the common repository of all tasks. From there, the most important is selected and put into operation. To understand what tasks you need to take from the backlog, the teams agree on the goals of the sprint. This process looks like bargaining, as many opinions are taken into account. But there is no other magic way to prioritize tasks.
BacklogIs a journal of the remaining work thatneed to run the team. The term came from the Agile family of methodologies, in particular from Scrum, where it is one of the main artifacts - the source of user stories.
After this, the sprint itself takes place - development of functionality, testing, quality control, then release and demonstration of the product to customers and other teams.
Thus, work on the “TalentTech.Adaptation” began with an idea: we studied the needs of the market and saw that many companies need to cover and evaluate the entire path of hiring a candidate: from his search to the first stages of work. The Russian market already has solutions for automating selection, training and goal setting, but nothing is provided for employee adaptation. Because of such a gap, you can quickly lose motivation and kill the involvement of a newcomer, which means that at the very beginning you can turn a great candidate into an uninitiated, dissatisfied employee.
Suppose it is not possible to involve a newcomer in the work processsucceeded - he quit on probation. What does this mean for business? If a recruiter in an IT company receives 100 thousand rubles and is expected to fill four vacancies per month, and it took 1.5 months to hire one person, then it will be 37.5 thousand rubles. We add to this amount three employee salaries, taking into account taxes and deductions, and we get approximately 931 thousand rubles spent on one employee over 4 months. Here you can also add the cost of working hours for mentors, teams, managers and accountants, as well as the cost of equipment for the workplace. And most importantly, these costs disappeared into thin air with his dismissal, meaning the business is suffering significant financial losses.
We conducted a study of 27 companies -potential customers: they asked where they had a "sore" and what needs to be addressed. It turned out that for many companies the adaptation process is a real problem. So, in one company, to digitize onboarding, you need to generate a whole report with graphs: how many people work the first day, how many documents are signed, how many are trained. To do this, the training department has to ring branches in all regions. Labor-consuming, costly and long.
Another company of 200 people has only one computer, and it is impossible to start work without a digital training program, since it contains the most important information about the processes.
Having analyzed all these “pains” of clients in the marketand having assessed the opportunity to streamline processes and reduce costs, we started developing the application. They decided to create a product and immediately pilot it within four companies: IT, retail, service and a company with online work for employees. What they had in common was that the team had distributed employees, with whom it was more difficult to communicate.
After 2.5 months, we launched the first pilot, anotherin a month - the second. Our task was to check how the product meets the requirements of the market. Before launching an application in a company, we always determine what metrics we want to influence with it: improving productivity, reducing costs, increasing employee motivation and the quality of mentors.
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