Blockchain Team — Team members

By Krzysztof Bury, Bartosz Dluzen, Maciej Marut

In previous articles, we have covered the need, budget, stakeholders and the business leader for our blockchain endeavour. What would be our next step? Hire the right people. It doesn’t matter if you will try to hire them as employees or as contractors. You have to be able to ask the right questions on the interviews or negotiations. You have to be able to put the right thing in the contract or statement of work.

So who do you need?

First you are looking for business leader. A person with experience in the field you have decided to experiment with. Person with experience and a proven track record of breaking the rules to get the job done. It would not do any harm if he or she are a bit of technology geeks (latest version of phone and house with lots of sensors and local NAS can be an indication).

Because of our background we see need for a data guy — all in all blockchain is just a distributed “database”. Person that can understand difference between structured and unstructured data sets. That can pull stuff from flat file, ERP system, SQL database or a file system. Can do attitude, basics and some success stories would do as a reference points. If we were you we would ask a question how much time it takes to pull or push data? Basing on answer or rather a counting questions you will get in return you can tell if there is capability.

Now we really need some hardcore programmers. You usually cannot buy everything. Building stuff will be required faster than you think. What to ask for? One of the authors of this article would say Python / JavaScript is a good foundation for many things in blockchain area. Another one will straight away add Solidity. Then he would say there is a need for asynchronous programming experience, node.js, Rest API, JSON Web Tokens. Fortunately we did not have to go back to databases and connected topics — this is covered by our data guy from previous part of the article.

Now you have too look at the core of the applications working in the business area you want to adress. Even in your cutting edge project you need some of this to make sure that you are not reinventing the wheel.

Now somebody will ask — where on our list you have blockchain developers. Those with years of experience and many successful implementations under their belt. Well — they don’t exist. But is this a good enough reason to forget about them? Definitely not. What is a good reason to forget about is the fact that blockchain is only the addition. It is the enabler that will allow you to address some of the issues you were not able to cope previously. It has got its place in overall architecture and might be a positive kick to get your problems addressed.

So getting back to setup of the team exercise you need a programmer like mentioned above. The only difference is that this person on the interview has to be able to share with you a comprehensive history of different blockchain developments from the past. After he or she are done with it you need to hear what is the vision for the future. Personal vision with some consideration given to current known limitations of blockchain. People like this are essential to get traction on things like smart contracts or distributed applications.

Now another important subject. How many we need. How many in general and how many of each. Our ideal world answer would be three of each. This number apart from magical connections allows for innovation. You need three non-collinear points to describe a plane.

Technical folks need somebody to talk with on daily basis. Sometimes they use other human beings as a rubber duck. That is ok. But in many occasions you need somebody to allow you to look broader. Thanks to that you can pivot and be more successful. So if not three then what? The answer is simple: How much you can afford?