What playing FIFA taught me about building teams
Assessing skills and fostering growth
I love sports, every kind of sports game like Basketball, Soccer, Running, Swimming, Football, etc, although, my love for sports is not only limited to real world sports, but also to the virtual-online sports games which include FIFA 17, pro-evolution, championship manager, etc.
As a kid, I spent hours playing every competitive game both on the field and the digital space such as PlayStation or Atari. The special part in every competitive e-sport game is that you are constantly learning, what you are doing right and what you should improve. Don’t get the wrong perception, I am pretty crappy in those games, but due to my interest in them, I had to invest hours, days and weeks in getting better.
Let’s take Championship Manager or FIFA as our model. In the beginning, it might feel like this is you against the machine, and it can become very frustrating, but like any other thing in life, practice and knowledge make you perfect. There are even different startups working to help people like me to perform better by analyzing your gaming pattern and helping you improve.
On Championship Manager, for example, there is a specific part of choosing the team and the players to play on the field without you even controlling the game. All you need to do is build your team by choosing your players and deciding who should play in what position depending on the capabilities and with whom they play better. You need to choose the best formation & players for the right match.
Think of this mode for a second. This isn’t different from your role as a leader. All you need to do is to map the skills needed. You also need to identify the developer’s role and map what the development team needs to succeed with the right people and skills. The first part is, however, identifying the language and ingredients of being a good engineer. Of course, there are plenty of posts out there although what you choose is not necessarily important. Build your language, based on your beliefs and knowledge.
The Spider Model (aka. Radar)
Back to our world, consider you are now leading a team of developers, and you must find ways to evaluate them. The best way to achieve this is nonetheless by reflecting on their current status and where you expect them to be in a year from now.
Personally, I use the spider model (aka. Radar). I use it to evaluate my team members and my entire team as a whole. Thus, I use it to better articulate what I expect and what is missing. Of course, I equally use it to plan to where I want to be by the end of the year.
Here is a great example, Marta Vieira da Silva, also known as Marta. She is a Brazilian football player, sometimes also referred to as the best female player of all time. You can see below how her skills and personal details are being represented.
Let’s try to build one ourselves for our employees.
Mapping Skills
The journey starts by mapping the list of skills you are looking for in a developer. Same as every football player has a unique set of skills that we can talk about; we would like to have the same for our employees.
Usually, I find it easier to do it in one of the following scenarios:
- The process of recruiting a new employee: During an interview of new candidates you must find ways to align your interviewers on what you are looking for.
- During 1-on-1 meetings: While evaluating their next growth vector together with your employees during a meeting, you should make sure you and your employees are using the same terminology to describe the situation. Similarly, the same terminology should be used when giving feedback on skills you want them to gain or improve.
Mapping Skills — Method and Questions to identify relevant skills
During those two occasions mentioned above, I usually use the following flow and questions to identify and build the relevant skills terminology.
- Write down a long list of your current knowledge and skills
- Aggregate them into buckets
- Evaluate if there are any forgotten skills. Are there buckets that we are missing?
- Think of the others on our team; do they have skills we want to gain in the following year?
- The Role Model exploration. Let’s think of your role model (e.g. John Resig) and try to understand the skills he has and those you want to gain.
However, accuracy isn’t paramount at this phase since your main goal is to get a list of skills that will later be used as your other player’s baseline. Also, the real value here is in the discussion. One example for a discussion I have seen over and over lately is that people are putting Design and Architecture in one bucket, saying “he has great design and architecture skills.” This great example leads us to an important discussion on the real differences between those two. For example, people who have great code design skills (SOLID, DRY) do not necessarily know or understand the system architecture as a whole.
Hence, you need to write those skills down, talk about them, challenge them and aggregate them into buckets.
Analyzing Your Skills
Now, let’s try to take one of your players, and put them on a scale from 1 to 3. (1- No knowledge at all in the specific domain, 2- Can develop day-to-day features in the specific domain, 3- Can lead complex features in the domain, and mentor others)
Here is an example mapping the legendary football player Gianluigi Buffon, based on the skills being chosen above.
In this example, Buffon has strong Agile and Planning as well as great leadership skills, but lacks a deeper understanding of the Architecture skill and doesn’t understand how it gets to production, and the technology stack we are using.
Deep Dive to explain Each Bucket
Each bucket that appears in the examples mentioned above is built from smaller components. For instance, you can read below how the architecture is being described on our system. In the end, the result of architecture is an aggregation of different entities (e.g. Deployment process, understanding of Scale and Performance aspects, ability to plan for capacity and security, etc)
Of course, some of the buckets are being built from more buckets and levels. However, the technology stack is built from Mobile, Front End, and Backend and is being aggregated by several internal skills (See below to get a better grasp on the technology stack you need to master to become an expert in our domains)
Map the Team
Now that we have a better breakdown, of each one of the buckets and skills we can evaluate our whole team against it.
Understanding your challenges & Choosing the right lineup
Now, that you have mapped every individual and subsequently better understood what everyone brings to the team, this is the time to jump to the next level by planning your next game.
- What is your next game? (Challenge)
- Who is your opponent? (Skills you need to win)
- How your talent is being organized together to win?
Taking another look at the main table, shows that you have a strong technology team, which is probably best in class in C#, Java, Backend, etc. Nevertheless, if your company is facing hyper growth and needs to scale, then it is apparent this wasn’t the foundation you were looking for. Hence, you will need many more people who have better understanding in Leadership as well as Agile & Planning to build new teams. Otherwise, you will have to recruit them from outside.
Hidden Skills
In games, it is known that players have hidden skills and other details that might impact their performances. However, those usually are not represented on the Spider. For example, age might impact, your health and tendency to injure. Also, in building the team, there are plenty of other factors not being mapped here, e.g., like how two people interact with each other and what flavor of tasks one might prefer to work with. This post is probably a completely different one, but it is worth taking this into consideration as well while designing.
Training and Bootcamps
I think that the most interesting artifact you can gain from those spiders is to understand better where you want to invest your time. For instance, if your organization is planning to move to mobile-only or mobile-first, but the team is being built with only 1–2 mobile developers, then be assured it is the time to invest more in training or creating a dedicated boot camp to boost your mobile thinking.
Summary
This is my story, and how FIFA helped me improve my skills and subsequently systematically build teams. I, however, hope my gaming journey will help you in designing and boosting your team as well. Of course, I would love to hear from you… Share back, leave a comment if you find this useful or have similar models you are using.
You can get access to the spreadsheet I used for this article here.
