Humans as a Service

There’s an intermediary stage that all companies have to go through, an adolescence, where there’s a need for a specific role, but not necessarily enough need for that role to hire someone full time. What tends to happen in that situation is that the responsibilities for the role are spread amongst the existing team where their skills and knowledge overlap the most.

There are, of course, benefits to this approach; it can be cost effective, it expands the skills of the existing team, it adds cross-training resilience, and it’s something you can do straight away. I’ve personally seen it work well on numerous occasions in the tech industry; you need DevOps support, but only a day or so a week, and there’s almost certainly someone in even a small developer team that has some experience in the field, so they step up.

An alternative is to use specialists in a part time capacity, where you get the expertise of someone whose key skills match the role, without taking time away from the rest of the team, allowing them to continue to focus on their core skills. They bring their years of experience to complement the existing team and to support them as you grow.

 

This latter approach is increasing in importance; the development landscape has, and continues to, change at an unprecedented pace. Time to MVP has never been shorter, the technical knowledge required is now thankfully low enough that it’s open to all, and the cost to get there is low enough that we’re seeing amazing and innovative ideas coming out that may otherwise have sat on a shelf.When you grow to the point that the role needs to be filled permanently, the responsibilities of the part time resource are used to fill out the job description, they can help during the recruitment process, and the handover of responsibilities is stress free as you are not taking responsibilities back from the core team.

meet your new

Chief Technical Officer

A CTO will work with the stakeholders and development team to put a long term strategy in place. They are not there to overturn the applecart, but to work with the existing technology stack if it’s in place, and to work collaboratively with the team.

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meet your new

Software Engineering Manager

While a CTO will focus on the technical direction, an Engineering Manager will focus on the delivery team, ensuring that the development team are productive, and most importantly, happy.

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