Building the best tech-team

This talk is a special one, because it’s an event within the Fest-UP!, the first-ever Barcelona’s Startup Festival that is happening in town this week.

And for this special occasion, our guest is also special! Pau Ramon will share with us his mistakes and learnings as CTO at Redbooth. His insights can be really helpful for all of us, not only for people that want to build a technical team, but also for people who are actually part of one.

For those who are not familiar with building a tech-team, you have to know that it has some great challenges. Pau’s talk will put the focus on:

Hiring: developers are scarce! How can I attract them?
Management: how to get the most of your team?
Growing: how can I be as productive when the team grows?
Building a Culture: how to make your team happy?
If you wanna learn about concepts, experiences and examples of building, growing and managing a tech-team from an experienced CTO, you can’t miss this talk!

Transcript

1. Building the best tech-team
2. Management
3. Management “ To coordinate the efforts of people to accomplish goals and objectives using available resources efficiently and effectively”
4. Who am I ? CTO at Redbooth ! Twitter: @masylum
5. Beware of bullshit • Learn from others • Every company is different • Don’t copy: common sense
6. What is this talk about ? • Recruitment • Optimization • Growth • Success
7. Recruitment
8. Seduction • Go meet interesting people • Interview? Go for a coffee! • Talk and listen, seduce and be seduced
9. Hiree Hirer
10. Who should I hire ? Bet on motivated generalists. ! Knowledge is easy and fast to acquire, talent is not.
11. Who should I hire ? Invest for the long term: Experience within the company is the most valuable asset
12. Optimization
13. Throughput
14. Stable system System Input Output
15. Idle system System Input Output
16. Saturated system System Input Output
17. Washing dishes Saturated Idle Soaping Rinsing
18. Synchronicity
19. Synchronicity • Inefficient in unstable systems • Less overhead • Not flexible
20. Synchronicity Soaping Rinsing Soaping Rinsing Team A Team B
21. Asynchronicity
22. Asynchronicity • Less waiting time • Requires queues • More overhead • More flexible
23. Asynchronicity Soaping Rinsing Soaping Team A Team B Queue Queue Soaping
24. Queues
25. Queues • Appear in saturated systems • Measurable • Ordered
26. LIFO: Last In First Out C B A
27. FIFO: First In First Out C B A
28. Prioritization • Agreed and arbitrary • Unfair but help focusing • Add age to the mix to avoid starvation
29. Multiple Queues
30. Multiple queues Alice Bob Chris
31. Multiple queues 1 day 5 days ! 12 hours Alice Bob Chris
32. Single queues Alice Bob Chris
33. Try to always go for a single queue and multiple consumers
34. Optimize! • Go asynchronous • Measure your queues • Identify your bottlenecks • Allocate people accordingly
35. Growth
36. Who should I hire ? • Avoid Single Point of Failures • Start getting specialists but not too many • Cultural fit is important!
37. When hiring, get your team involved
38. Success
39. Choose two: Scope Resources Time
40. Motivation • Bad : Carrots and sticks • Good : Autonomy, Mastery, Purpose http://bit.ly/1eVm5pI
41. Motivation • Encourage Collaboration over Competition • Set team goals, not individual • Let the team be the judge
42. Rules!
43. No rules
44. Rules
45. Rules and Culture • Rules have to be agreed • Culture is the enforcer: Let the team be the police • After a mistake, think of a rule that could’ve prevented it
46. Teams Coordinator Coordinator Coordinator Vertical collaboration on a given project
47. Coordinators • They are doers • They are responsible for the performance of the group • They are the spokeperson of the team
48. That’s all folks Thanks