Unique example from the real experience

How to Build a Development Team for IT Startup?

Learn how to build a software development team for any IT startup. Take our ready-to-use example from our real experience and implement it in your process.

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Building a team is a significant step in every project development process. Consider this step carefully. Remember, the success of your project depends on the people who work with you.

However, building a competent software development team is not just gathering good developers and supplying them with a fine coffee. You should build a concrete plan and answer beforehand such questions as:

• What project type do we have?
• What hard skills should team members have to be able to deal with the tasks?
• How many team members do we need to cover all our deadlines?
• What soft skills should team members have to work together without trouble?
• What means and style of communication should we choose?
• etc.

As we see, the first thing you should carry out is to understand what your project be like.

Note to remember: There is no need to hire various trendy specialists if you don’t know where to use them and what they should do on your project.

Start managing this process with our step-by-step scenario:

1. First, define the project idea, develop its concept and determine its functional modules.
2. Second, establish the size of the team, their roles, and responsibilities.
3. Third, build an agile development process for the project and adapt it to your workflow.
4. Fourth, build communications between teammates.

Let’s have a look at these stages in detail.

1. Define the project idea and its concept

This step is important. The right thought-out idea will lead to the desired result. Think carefully about the total scope of initial requirements you need to implement for developing your project. It will give you the answer to how many team members do you really need to cover all your tasks.

The concrete steps on how to define a project idea and develop its concept are given in the article Project Development Process for Creating an Online Store.

2. Establish the size of the team, their roles, and responsibilities

After when you’ve learned what your project is about and how many stages it will consist of, you can determine how many team members you need to cover the whole project development process.

The structure of the software development team roles looks as follows:

Figure 1. The diagram of the software development team roles structure.

Let’s describe each role and give the description of their responsibilities:

1) PRODUCT OWNER

The product owner is the leading role in the whole project who knows how the final project should look and operate. The product owner provides high-level requirements to the whole project and submits the final releases. Usually, specialists assigned to this position should have technical and analytical skills in the required field.

The main responsibilities include:

1. Exploring the subject area and analyzing the competitors’ advantages and disadvantages;
2. Expediting the current market trends, examining the hypothesis, and formulating ideas for new features;
3. Determining the high-level requirements, deadlines, and project scope for the current development stage.

2) PROJECT MANAGER

The project manager should be good at planning, executing, monitoring, and implementing projects. Each project manager is expected to deliver a project on time and within the budget. Usually, the project manager receives high-level tasks from the Product Owner, builds a project road map, defines and describes sub-tasks for Business Analysts.

The main responsibilities include:

1. Defining the project’s scope and determining available resources;
2. Controlling the time management and team productivity;
3. Monitoring the budget and planning all activities to avoid its massive overruns;
4. Analyzing and managing project risks.

3) BUSINESS ANALYST

The business analyst is a specialist who provides the business processes description. During the development process, the business analyst plays the role of a bridge between the business and development parts.

The main responsibilities include:

1. Gathering and document requirements;
2. Modeling business processes;
3. Analyzing the project structure and building the project concept.

4) TEAM LEAD

The team lead is the person responsible for the whole development lifecycle. Usually, team leads grow out of senior developers’ positions. Team leads don’t code themselves, they just build the workflow for the development process and monitor it.

The main responsibilities include:

1. Designing the development workflow using a Task Management System;
2. Managing the development process and assigning tasks among the developers;
3. Communicating with teams about their current performance;
4. Motivating team members, discovering training needs, and providing coaching;
5. Planning and organizing team-building activities.

5) SYSTEM ARCHITECT

The system architect role speaks for itself. This specialist determines the principles of building system architecture for the current project and takes the responsibility for making strategic project decisions.

The system architecture is a ground for building program components and their interactions with each other.

The main responsibilities include:

1. Designing system architecture;
2. Reviewing the code to ensure its quality and clearness;
3. Keeping the code simple and functional;
4. Providing tech support across the different stages of the project development lifecycle.

6) SYSTEM ANALYST

The system analyst presents the complete user scenarios for each business function.

The main responsibilities include:

1. Describing business functions in step-by-step scenarios;
2. Assisting system architect and business analysts;
3. Preparing detailed technical assignments for developers.

7) SOFTWARE DEVELOPER

Usually, software development is divided into 2 parts: Frontend and Backend.
Sometimes we can meet Full Stack developers. It means that one developer can manage both Frontend and Backend parts.

Frontend Developer

This specialist is responsible for ensuring the alignment of web design and user experience requirements, optimizing web pages for various resolutions, and maintaining brand consistency across all web pages.

The main responsibilities include:

1. Determining the structure and design of web pages;
2. Developing features to enhance the user experience;
3. Optimizing web pages for maximum speed and scalability;
4. Assuring that all user inputs are validated before submitting to backend;
5. Collaborating with UX/UI designers and back-end developers.

Backend Developer

This specialist is responsible for developing the server-side of the project. They focus on databases, scripting, website architecture. Code written by backend developers helps browsers to communicate with database information.

The main responsibilities include:

1. Collaborating with Front-end developers;
2. Building high-quality reusable code that can be used in the future;
3. Developing functional and sustainable web applications with clean codes;
4. Troubleshooting and debugging applications;
5. Conducting UI tests and optimizing performance.

8) UX/UI DESIGNERS

UX means a user experience that focuses on creating the project prototype architecture according to the prepared user scenarios by the business/system analysts. The main goal of UX designers is to adopt the visual project design for achieving the desired interactions between the business and its customers.

The main responsibilities include:

1. Providing deep user research to perform the effective user experience;
2. Analyzing the user scenarios and building the project prototype;
3. Expressing functional logic via interaction design tools.

UI means a user interface that focuses on creating a branding and graphic design, a color palette, and project layouts. The main goal of UI designers is to present the project idea via visual tools.

The main responsibilities include:

1. Creating and implementing the visual design for a project idea presentation;
2. Developing a visual design for various devices and screen resolutions.

Very often, we can meet that UX and UI design can be developed by the same designer. Sometimes, the UX design falls to Business Analysts who prepares a project prototypes.

9) QA ENGINEERS

The Quality Assurance Engineers (QA) are responsible for controlling the quality of program code. They check how final functionality corresponds with specifications and technical design documents. They take part in planning and implementing phases for quality management and testing.

The main responsibilities include:

1. Testing the current products and identifying their inconsistencies;
2. Suggesting solutions to identified product problems;
3. Investigating a product quality by making improvements to achieve better customer satisfaction;
4. Collaborating with the Development team to ensure consistent project execution.

10) SUPPORT ENGINEERS

The support engineers try to regulate communications between customers and product owners. Usually, they serve as experts in the products that their company develops. They find solutions to problems with the products and help customers work through technical difficulties.

The main responsibilities include:

1. Filling up reports regarding product issues;
2. Researching technical inconsistencies;
3. Managing and process customer orders;
4. Reviewing product change requests;
5. Learning about product updates and new technologies.

Resume

Here we have defined the key roles for our future team and built the hierarchy of roles. In my next article, I will show how to set up the agile development workflow and establish effective interactions between team members.

Stay tuned!