Are Your Engineers Fungible Enough?
For startups developing technology with a broad set of applications, pivots often happen after the team starts to scale. On the Seedcamp podcast, Azeem Azhar shared how he guided his company Peer Index from a personalised content curation service to a data business that targeted influencers. He described that process in the podcast:
“We had a real challenge in the sense that I hadn’t hired lots of engineers who were designed for data business. And so we had to help up-skill existing engineers that we had to really rebuild a new style of engineering culture which a couple of our engineering leaders did did quite well. So you know when you pivot you’ve also got this issue that sometimes people are not fungible in intellectual skills or behavior basis as you pivot.”
Azeem led his team through this first pivot successfully in spite of them not being well prepared for the necessary changes. But as he sees it, taking flexibility into account when hiring could have made the process smoother.
So ask yourself, is your team ready to shift to different types of product, interactions and industries? Are you hiring engineers with very narrow expertise who could have difficulty adjusting if you need to pivot?
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