Yet another chapter story
Yes, I know, you have already heard or read that many times. Some company is going into some variation of Spotify Chapter model. They try, change & adjust some rules and sometimes even succeed. So let me tell you another chapter story which we think might bring a lot of goodness to our people and our company.
It all started not so long ago in StepStone tech organization. We saw that our teams struggle with self development and constant conflict between roadmap deliveries, requests from stakeholders, training and just making engineer life easier. We had many different ideas how to approach that issue. Of course the company have wide scope of courses open for people to participate. Anyone could also choose any external study they want to take. We were organizing innovation days where each team could focus either on some new ideas or just on internal training and self development without any disturbance. It was all working quite nice but we needed some more structured approach. Especially that we wanted to connect training plans and development plans for the people with progress in their careers. It is where chapter model comes in handy.
We decided to structure our chapters in hierarchical way. There is one high level template chapter for all engineers and then we go more into details creating chapter for developers, devOps, analysts, scrum masters and many other functions (either directly engineering or supporting ones). Then each of the specialized chapters is again divided in more focused ones like JAVA developers, Python developers etc. This structure assures us that every person is belonging to the chapter closest to her specialty. If you are the only Scala dev in the company then you belong to developers chapter as there is no point to create one only for you. We also decided that each chapter needs one person to drive it, someone to be a leader in all activities and somehow coordinating people’s work and exchange of information between different job families. That is the role of a Chapter Lead.
One can ask why this chapter model is so important and why we think it will succeed. We would like our people to grow and develop their skills. We think that by allowing them to do so we, as the organization, would eventually benefit out of it. Why not do that within our borders then? And we hope it will work because we assured all chapter members that we give them from 10% up to 30% time to spend on chapter activities only. This is guaranteed from top managers through directors to line managers. It is just a part of their job to allow teams spend this 20% on average on chapter work.
But by giving all of that to chapters and chapter members we would like to have something in return. That is a detailed plan of career paths for each of the job families. Each chapter is expected to design and maintain detailed career levels for its members. If you want to be DevOps Engineer in StepStone you know exactly what requirements you need to fulfill to advance on that road. DevOps Chapter will guide you and coach you on your journey. They know which trainings you should take, which technology stack you should know and what projects are more interesting for you taking into account your life plan for being in that role.
I have a pleasure to be a Chapter Lead of Data chapter. As the root for all data connected chapters it combines specialties from various areas like BigData Engineers, Data Scientists, Machine Learning Engineers and many more. Of course each of those job families have their own organizations where their chapter life takes place. We started our journey by organizing kick-offs just recently but it already took attention of the people. At first those meetings were full of questions and doubts but when everyone saw that this might actually work and it would give them a freedom to design their own path of development they felt more secure. New structure gave the power to the people to take their future in their own hands and decide how it will look like. This is very powerful experience and would benefit both for them and for the organization. I’m happy I could be a part of that adventure.
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