How to manage skills in a startup team
Congratulations, if you are interested in this article it means you startup is growing.
However with growing comes a headache.
One: Team doesn’t share knowledge effectively
Two: you don’t know how to onboard new employees fast
Three: some of you top developers is production bottleneck
Four: team is losing general productivity.
We have some good news for you. We are building a product that helps teams manage required skills and learn new thing effectively.
But first, let’s check what practices are popular now.
Performance Review Sheet:
You performance is managed based on Sheet of Qualities:
Don’t skip work ✅
Help other team member with tasks ✅
Analisys in Excel ✅
SQL ❌
This is how major corporations usually work.
Pros of this approach: You get some sort of data
Cons: Bird view (you can’t see peaks and falls in productivity), Opinion Based, Stressful (review is like an exam), Not suitable for fast growing professional (usually 6 months iteration).
Level Based Matrix Review:
All skills are distributed on levels, so you have UX design skills for Level 1, 2, etc.
For each level you have to be able to DO something:
level 0: know what is UX
level 1: analyse user data, prototype components
level 2: conduct an interview, prototype lager interface, etc.
You got the point…
Pros: Perspective (people know opportunities)
Cons: Same as first one.
What’s next?
We are building product, that is pretty shady for now, but turns out to be a real white swan.
Vectorly is an app that helps startup teams Make learning part of its workflow.
For each role in you team you create a skillboard it’s knowledge base + map to understand what skills you could develop.
Have new employee, just invite him to Skillboard, so she get’s what are basics, next, next, etc.
The magic is yet to come, we will track you progress: watched video on Coursera, completed task, we record it to you progress. As you learn we recommend you new things.
But we humans, right? So robot will recommend, but human communicate.
We give advice on who to promote, who is stagnating and losing focus to help.
Pros: Perspective, Skill data hub, Real time progress, transparent feedback, we could continue.
Cons: In Beta, so many features are underdevelopment.
Try out Vectorly Beta and give feedback, it’s an Intercom icon to chat.
