Hiring approach for digital delivery
So you have finally gotten the funding to deliver your first digital product and eager to form your first digital delivery team. Like many others, you are probably perplexed about the required roles and ideal team composition.
Here’s some help to demystify this common question :)
Key guiding principles — to avoid hiring mistakes
- Every product has different needs — there’s no one ideal team composition so please don’t copy blindly from others
- Hire one full stack role for each group — this is more prudent than hiring multiple sub-roles per group. Less gets more done.
- Start with generalist with higher learning agility over specialist — This allows you to defer certain hiring decision to the last responsible moment. Unless your company hires and fires, slow is fast.
This is a full stack role
- Sub-role 1
- Sub-role 2
- Sub-role 3
Full stack designer
- Visual designer
- Interaction designer
- Content designer
- User researcher
Full stack delivery lead
- Product Manager (here’s how a kickass PM looks like)
- Scrum master or even better, a delivery manager
Full stack developer
- Frontend developer
- Backend developer
- Build & release engineer
Full stack DevOps engineer
- Build & release engineer
- SRE
Full stack quality engineer
- Application security engineer
- Application performance engineer
- Test automation engineer
What else
- Unicorns are rare and here’s some help to find them.
- Subsequent hires in each group allow more specialization. E.g. The second hire for each group should fill the skills gap of the first hire.
- Common skills in each group lend itself well to engender T-shaped and eventually π-shaped specialists.
- Back-filling a position? Do a SWOT analysis with your team to identify their skills gap because you do not know everything. :)
- Grown so big that you’re thinking of having a CTO, VP or Director of Engineering?
- And everything else you need to know about building an agile team, and then scaling up — thanks to Poh Kah Kong, our awesome 💪 delivery manager!
Here’s what we do at GDS. We’re looking for great team players with solid technical chops. Join us to build awesome digital services for our fellow citizens and businesses! CV -> steven_koh@tech.gov.sg.
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Let’s make our tech industry 🇸🇬 great again! 😉
Cheers! :)
