- De-risking new product ideas and launches. The need to rapidly test, build, and scale products while mitigating risk is essential.
- The skillsets needed to support new initiatives, like embedded AI-based patient pathways, or provider’s insights, are highly specialized. Talents with these kinds of skillsets are even harder to hire.
- The ability to continually evolve. It’s not enough to transform an enterprise, but continually grow as technologies continue to advance.
Why Hard-to-Find Tech Talent Changes the Relationship Paradigm in Tech Culture
My entrepreneurial experiences have taught me that if you chase a new hire too hard, you introduce risks that employees will join the company purely for transactional reasons and potentially less because they believe in the company’s vision and success. Those hires accomplish their tasks as well as initiatives, projects, goals, and department operations. However, their commitment may be fleeting and decoupled from the belief in a joint purpose if they are purely there for compensation. This ultimately affects the culture of the company, big or small, and can introduce Culture Debt. Culture debt can create a range of unintended consequences, including PR issues, morale issues, consumer confidence issues, legal liability, and retention. The cost of cultural onboarding through training and aligning is an investment of itself. This is on top of developing technical competencies and aligning with delivery standards, necessary to avoid technical debt. Consequently, Cultural Debt may eventually cause a serious domino effect that can kill your organization.The Alternative: a New Paradigm of Bringing in External, Specialized Teams that Scale
Instead of traditional outsourcing, vendors, and consultants, bring in a specialized team who are experienced, ready to perform, and can better meet the needs of growing organizations. Successful teams have the following key characteristics:- They operate well together, both with partners and organizations. If the incoming teams don’t iterate well, there is a risk of friction and worse outcomes. Only experienced teams with solid processes can achieve this.
- They are experts in their field. Talents with domain expertise provide technical ramp-up in the knowledge and experience in specific industries and projects, which further minimizes learning curves and adds better perspective for building and launching products.
- They feel true ownership over the product they are building as well as the alignment with the organization’s vision and success. Successful teams don’t feel like the end of a phase is the end of a project. They truly want to see their client succeed in their business efforts.
Not many teams meet all the three criteria above. To be able to build, and unleash the power of transformational teams, product, research, and engineering leaders should consider creating a strategy on how to bring in talents with these three key attributes.
