By Søren Grubov
The evolving work landscape has transformed collaboration methods. Although some fundamentals persist, creating an effective SaaS team demands agility and a diverse skill set mix.
Michael Jordan knows a thing or two about being part of a successful team: “Talent wins games, but teamwork and intelligence win championships.” Regardless of the sector, type or company, there are certain characteristics that any high-performing team has. For instance, they have clear goals tied to team and organizational priorities. They communicate clearly, understand how their work fits into the greater mission, and have defined roles and responsibilities.
Changes in the world of work have had a significant impact on the way we collaborate and work together. In particular, having increasingly distributed teams requires a different approach from the way things used to be done. While many of the fundamentals remain the same, building a high-performance team for the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) world requires a nuanced understanding and approach that prioritizes agility and brings together a mix of skill sets.
Challenges to building a good team
Hiring and attracting talent in a competitive marketplace is a challenge for teams of any size, and for almost any industry and geography. COVID-19 led to remote work, which created the possibility of hiring without regard to location. This meant more distributed teams. Yet while some employees embraced working from home, others grew tired of it and wanted to return to the office at least a few days a week. This then led some people to seek new jobs closer to their homes – a blow to companies already struggling to hire in the midst of a tech skills shortage.
Distributed teams have created new challenges. These aren’t insurmountable, but they do require a new approach. While remote work has been a positive in many ways for many employees, it can sometimes have a major impact on the instances of spontaneous communication and collaboration that you get with a team that all works in the same physical location.
What can also happen is that because meetings are limited and there is less cross-team communication, you can essentially end up with echo chambers that tend to limit innovation. New means of collaboration need to be brought in.
Four elements of a high-performing SaaS/cloud team
It’s easy to get caught up in the technology without a true understanding of how an actual user is going to interact with it. That can lead to products and solutions that falter. That’s why you need to focus on the end-user. You want your engineering teams to be close to the customers using the solutions they built.
When assembling a high-performing team, look for these attributes:
Cross-functional – When it comes to putting together a high-performing team, you need someone who can be cross-functional. This covers both of the classic roles: development and testing, as well as CI/CD and operations or the monitoring aspect of operations. Ideally, teams will have a good understanding of proper development and test practices, and also understand how to build CI/CD to pipelines that are running both test and deployment. Teams then need to have insight into how to create good data that can be monitored to see both the successful use of the product and that everything is functioning properly.
Good at aligning processes – This includes everything from coming up with an idea to then delivering it in production. In the past, there were stages. First came the ideation period where the process of describing the desired outcome took place. Then it was handed over to a technical architect to design. And there was a design document that went to the team and then underwent an implementation process. Next, it was handed over to be finally tested and then handed to operations so they could deploy it and bring it into production. But in this new way of working, you break this process into much smaller iterations and expect that individuals or teams can carry out many more steps in this process without handing it over.
A strong product manager – These individuals play a key role in prioritizing what to invest in next. This gives the engineering teams a clear line of sight. The product manager must define what is to be built and what value it will bring. This clarity is a motivating factor for the teams. They know their work has a purpose: to bring value to the company and to the customers.
A team where each member has an area of expertise – The “jack of all trades” or generalists are still useful, but it’s more important than ever to have a team with complementary skill sets and expertise.
Leading the high-performing team
Leaders also need to be cross-functional. Leaders are challenged with having to cover the full scope of a team’s delivery. They often aren’t the ones with the most expertise; rather, they are the people who can bring everyone else together and serve as a catalyst for team empowerment. Their technical expertise takes a back seat to their people skills so they can foster motivation, collaboration and a good team culture.
So then, finding a good leader is really about finding a complementary mix of soft and technical skills. When recruiting for this role, look for the curiosity to learn and develop a variety of skills. The courage to try new things and learn from failures is also essential. The organization moves forward and evolves every time it learns from these failures. The leader must cultivate an environment where failure is allowed.
Making teams work
As remote and hybrid work have taken hold, creating high-performing teams has gotten harder. Good collaboration becomes essential, as does having a mix of skill sets and a leader who can provide clarity, practice curiosity and inspire courageous action. Learning from failure and making it acceptable are also key to a successful SaaS team.
About the Author
Søren Grubov is the VP of Engineering at Omada. He specializes in building software engineering teams and spearheading the development and delivery of high-quality software solutions. With a career marked by dedication to people and technology, Søren has established himself as a leader who drives technical innovation and fosters a culture of collaboration and growth.
