Thank you @karol_andruszkow! You've hit the nail on our sweet spot 😀
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I think it's a great idea!
As a developer, I've seen some projects failing because the right skills to get the job done were not in the team. But I've also seen the exact opposite, too many specialists in a project that didn't require that many.
And the biggest challenge is to talk about these problems between the team and the management level. Having a tool that makes it easier to visualize those problems will definitely help in the conversation.
Good luck with the launch!
@nicfix Absolutely. And its even better if these things can be surfaced pro-actively to spot potential problems before they even happen.
One thing that we're thinking about is finding ways to encourage developers (and all team members) to keep their skills up to date so that leaders can make the right decisions. What do you think would be good ways to do this? (it could be a feature, manual entry, an integration, data from github - we're thinking about all these things and others!!!)
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@markvertra personally speaking I felt I was growing my skills the most in these situations:
* I had a team around me that was much better than me, that made me learn a lot by "osmosis"
* I had a challenging problem to solve by myself, that made me stretch out of the comfort zone and figure out things while doing
* I had time to dedicate to "formalize" what I learned while doing
The first 2 were highly dependent on the team and/or the project I was working on. Obviously different persons have different situations in which they feel they are growing more.
Hope this helps :)
@nicfix Thanks so much for the feedback - this matches my experience as an engineer.
To help the learning by 'osmosis', we're definitely thinking of surfacing the 'seniority balance' in the team - so when you're planning a team you make sure there is a good match of juniors and seniors - some sort of score or 'experience distribution. We could also look at skills balance - so not too many people with exactly the same skills, but also some overlap.
We also want to make sure people can nominate what they want to work on and what their growth goals are, and perhaps list 'favourite teams they want to join'. Its really important for us that we make Ourspace deliver value for team mates as they go on their career journeys. How does that sound?
Huge potential. I wouldn't be able to count the hours I've spent in Airtable, Excel or Notion to come up with some poor solution to manage my squads. Worst thing is that every team does it differently and you end up redoing it from scratch every time you join a new org. Really cool
@damirdiz totally echo what you've described! We've been so poorly equipped to design teams that we've all resorted to gluing together various spreadsheets and other artifacts. Would love to know more about how you'd started from scratch every time in the past 👀
@damirdiz Thanks Damir - I couldn't agree more that every organisation you join you have to figure out how to navigate the different Miro boards, Confluence docs etc to get a good idea of whats going on. One of the things Ourspace hopes to do is be able to give a clear view of what an organisation looks like, who works on what and who owns what, at all levels of granularity.
And of course, we want to make team design easy, so you can get back to building awesome products and delivering value to users, instead of getting bogged down playing the people puzzle
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It looks great 😍 Working out who owns what in a company can be such a nightmare - it looks like OurSpace have have hit the nail on the head! Congrats on the launch 🎉
@barbara_murphy thank you! How is that gap filled where you currently work?
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@megan_murphy Not very well, I must admit. We suffer from all of the typical challenges that large organizations face--Who does what? Where is the source of truth for that information? How can I make sure the right person is in the right role?
@nick_paloukos Thanks so much! And on Slack - that's exactly what we're going for! Why should anyone have to leave the context of their natural workflow simply to keep a source of truth updated? That's so 2010 🙈
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Exciting solution to a very common challenge I'm encountering within my own team and many of our partners.
@snedziboy We would love to hear more about how you currently face this challenge! We're all 👂
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@markvertra Right now - it's a very manual and incremental process based on leaders reviewing existing an existing team structure (saved in MS Office); assessing upcoming new priorities, and identifying gaps/bottlenecks within them (based on t-shirt sizing and high level understanding of those priorities); then addressing those gaps by proposing where realignments/incremental resources are needed. This is highly reliant on managers understanding in detail their teams' skills profile.
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