Summary: While most business leaders solely focus on hiring top-rated talent, Divyesh Patel, CEO, Radixweb, reveals that building a truly innovative software development team means believing in its people and ‘allowing’ them the autonomy to innovate.
And you thought getting to hire dedicated developers is all it takes to build a great software development team?
I’ll tell you it’s not! You might have the best-in-class talent in your team but without a proper direction, they are lost in a forest of diverse market expectations. As a next-gen tech leader, you need to strike a balance between aligning to your business goals, your long-term vision and the need to acclimatize with the ever-changing challenges of the market to maintain rapid growth cycles.
We are entering into a time of economic volatility with the predictions of an impending recession. While it is important to put a brake on spearheading expenses to soften the economy, it is equally important to rapidly innovate against an erratic market to keep the workforce in the right morale.
While most-of us have been focusing on digital-first innovation, now is the time to amplify the effects of user-first innovation to make the best use of top-notch talent and carve a niche for your brand in the market.
Here are a few tips to foster a culture of innovation company-wide so that you can minimize the impact of recession on your business:
Rethink the picture – Think Long-term
While short-term measures may lucrative at some point, and many CTOs and business leaders seek to implement short-term remedies in the hope of salvaging losses, it backfires in the end! The reflex to sprint into short-term, stop gap modules not only hinders your product development process, but hinders the right growth of your talent model inevitably.
This specially holds true for SaaS based business models where the culture of innovation is unflinchingly correlating to its growth and success. Risk taking in economically turbulent times apparently seems hazardous. But with calculated risks, you can reach the peak of innovation, through innovation itself.
Foster Larger Collaboration with Company-wide Innovation Policies
The key to building a resilient software development team is to keep adding meaningful resources to the team. And for this to happen, you must be flexible. Think of the COVID surge during 2020 when thousands of remote profiles actually kept businesses operational, filling for in-office positions.
At Radixweb, we have experimented rapidly with our hiring models – from hiring people from geographical locations, accommodating them in the team, albeit virtually to hiring people from different professional backgrounds. And I can proudly say at this stage that this strategy has definitely boosted our overall productivity. Not only are we more cumulative in terms of diverse perspectives, but we have built a team of loyal professionals who have time and again proven their loyalty to our business and helped us assist in maintaining business continuity for our clients.
Cross Functional Teams to Put Process into Practice
Let me tell you about the biggest blunder that most business leaders make! They hire brilliant resources but forget about the people they have in their teams. Now with the changing equilibrium in the market, with time traditional roles in business become redundant and that’s where a lot of perfect resources go waste – because they have practically nothing to do!
Feeling the pulse of this problem, we purged our focus on building cross functional teams. Our people across every team are encouraged to explore diverse professional upskilling sessions from industry experts. This not only keeps them motivated, but has given us 650+ professionals most of whom juggle different functions that what their specializations were.
Afterall, only when you take the onus for positive employee experience, do they brace up for building ‘right’ systems for brilliant client experiences.
Set Up a Team-led Model
As business leaders, we must remember that the true blood of innovation stems from the feelings of being trusted, having ownership and being able to take certain decisions. Every resource in a software development team needs space and reassurance of a certain kind to be in the true spirit of innovation.
A team-led model identifies the stagnancy of traditional processes where teams are run by managerial preferences. It enables a software team to determine unique roadmaps for projects to reach their goals. While daily scrums and progress checks are a part of the health-check for software projects, only a team-led approach paves the way for maximum collaboration between teams and goes a long way on the path to innovation.
A lot of us business leaders think our jobs are done by acquiring top-notch talent into the team. However, building a truly innovative team takes more efforts than just hiring. It requires the leaders to be truly aligned and committed to long-term goals and the willingness to step out of restrictive traditions. Because often times, we ourselves are the sharpest thorn deflating the panorama of innovation!
