- May 24, 2022
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How to build a tech team? A conversation with Leo Benkel, Founder of PURE LAMBDA (Part II)
Leo Benkel is an advisor, technologist, and investor. He is also the founder of PURE LAMBDA, a consulting company that provides mentoring and advisory services to help startups, scaleups, and funds solve their challenges pragmatically and innovatively.
Find the part I of this interview here.
Would you say that the success of a tech team is linked to its connection and work with the business team?
Nowadays, and especially at an early stage, you cannot afford not to have a user-driven development. It is essential. As a founder, if you're not technical, you are the face of the company talking to customers, and you will be the salesperson. If you're more technical, maybe you'll have someone that connects more with the customers daily. But at the beginning, you want the boundaries and the frontiers between the Tech Team and the Business Team to be super thin. You want the engineers and the Tech Team to know how the product is used, and this comes from the feedback of the Business Team, which can be done in several ways.
1. The first way will be with customer tracking to have
a dashboard to know what feature is used and what element is not used.
2. You can have a feedback form on your product. So
users can be like: "I'm not too fond of this thing, or I love
that…."
3. And you should do user interviews: "How do you
like the product? What don't you like?".
A company that I like is called "ClickUp", a project management platform. They have, on their platform, a feature with an "idea submission form" and, as a user, you can say that you want to have this type of insight or this type of feature. Furthermore, you can see all the other users' suggestions and vote on them. The Tech and Dev Team at "ClickUp" will prioritise them based on how many votes they get. They are mastering user-driven development.
Assess this sentence: “Your new CTO
or the CIO himself should be the one choosing the Tech Team.”
You
don't need a CTO if you don't have a tech team yet.
What you need at the beginning, as we discussed, is one or more founding engineers. People think that they all need a technical co-founder or a CTO. But the problem is that the role of the CTO changes a lot as the company grows. And when you look at that, you realise that the CTO is just a manager at the early stage. And most of the time, this person also writes code. You can call it a CTO, but it is not a CTO. A CTO is for companies with hundreds of employees that need to look at the company's long-term vision. But at an early stage, the company's long-term vision is done by the founder. You don't want to hire a full time CTO at an early stage because you will have a very awkward discussion when the company grows and you need a “real” CTO. So ideally, you will have your team of engineers, and among those people, you want to make sure that the tasks you give them daily match their career goal, understand what their goals are in the next 2, 3 or 5 years, be it more on the tech side or the management side. And with time, you might identify who can take this role of CTO among your team when the company grows. Hiring externally, when you have internal talents that could fulfil a role, is most often a wrong decision because you will crush the mood of all your employees by closing up growth opportunities for their career. Most likely, they will quit thinking, "if I don't have the opportunity to grow here, I'm going to grow somewhere else". But in the case you don't have any of the skills required, or maybe all your team of engineers wants to be very technical and not interested in people management, you will need a manager from outside. And it is fine, but you're going to have a steep learning curve for this new person to onboard them properly.
In the high scarcity of tech talent
we face, how do you attract tech talents as a startup CEO in Luxembourg?