Building our Team - Money

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I write this article based on the insight of my conversation with my team in our monthly 1-on-1 call. I speak with each one of my team members. This article is a compilation of a whole week's takeaway. You can read more about the reason for it in the article?Restart.

Where can a new person find all the conversation about building our team's culture?

You can visit https://73bit.com/BuildingOurTeam I would recommend each one of you bookmark it so that when anyone asks you this question you can share this link. The guidance would be that if they are interested in learning more about cultural questions ask them to read the post after number 68 named Restart - https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/building-our-team-restart-vikram-shetty/

How to Look for waste work to eliminate. It should give you 50% of your productive time back per day on an average?

We are not going into the mechanics of methods and process of applying culture in our day to day work. I will share the framework that I have picked from a time management course. Let's call it Urgent vs Importance Framework. Breaking your daily log into 1 hour each. Do the log for the next 10 days that's 2 business weeks. Do a review after 2 weeks and mark against each item Was it urgent & important? Most of the waste has an attribute of urgent but not important. What is important for us now? Is it adding value to clients? Are we making money from this work? Is it good enough for the client? Is it reducing unclarity for the team? Is it increasing the confidence in delivery on time?

Some other indicators of waste you can mark is 1) Skill deficits in both technical and human skills 2) Rabbit hole doing trial and error or non-productive work 3) unproductive team meeting 4) Misinformation or lack of it 5) Expectation/priority mismanagement 6) Collogues pull up for questions 7) Non-work??

Let's lean on some leverage something we already have and build on it. Most of you are already logging in https://probench.plan.io/. Break it for a 1-hour chunk. When we say you will get 50% back it means that those hours will double your outcome. To be specific it's billable hours for each one of us. it's about measuring if your billable hours are maintained each month and have a trend of moving upwards. So that you will never be labelled as unproductive or a liability to the team.?

What to do with the time you got back? Constantly look for the things to remove, simplify, and streamline.

How to put across a point to a lead without offending them?

The first suggestion I will make is to reframe the question into "How to suggest my observation to my lead?" The question itself takes the pressure off to offend or put the guards up for both individuals. Let's take an example of the differences between the development team and the testing team. One gets a point to prevent adding bugs and the other to add bugs. It's by design a conflict zone. As they say, innovation is the brainchild of conflict and cooperation. The question arises if it's a bug or an improvement.?

I will take the original question of?"How to suggest my observation to my lead?" to convey this is not a bug (developers perspective).?

Some do and don't in negotiation.?

Dos: objective observations, Data backed decisions, polite presentation, empathic engagement

Don'ts: Aggressive attacks, offensive language, fixed mindsets, single point of view, proving your point, forced agreements

You state the reasons for not accepting it at a bug, not having time to fix it, too complex to fix, and already existing bugs should have been picked at the scrum meetings. You also can ask them to think about an easy solution to fix it? The focus should be to fix high risk and high-value bugs. Your job is to help the tester find high-quality bugs so that you can deliver high-quality code. This negotiation is the perfect place to do some creative thinking. You have to measure the output of the conversation by the amount of value it created for clients, in the product and for our company.?

Treat this question not as a source of conflict but as a session of learning. Once you shift your focus towards value creation every conversation can be converted to a 10X outcome.?

PS: This one is a guide to developers but the principle can be adopted by the rest of the team too.?

How can developers actively participate in increasing the sales of 73bit?

I can think of 3 ways you can do that 1) Identify to improve Sprint by increasing billable hours 2) Identify work that is loss-making and give the list to Gautam and Vikram to say NO to clients 3) Add features in Probench that will help our users to tell their friends about Probench.?

1) Find ways to increase the billable hours. It can be applying a simple solution to deliver a feature or change request. It can be learning an advanced language to write a code in half time. It can be taking leverage of the code library. It can be learning from past mistakes and creating systems to fix them. You can automate common parts of your development so that you have scripts writing the code like a bot. You leverage the latest technology that can be integrated into our product to create new value. If you start thinking in this line you will start building many assets that starts working for you.?

2) I call it the NO workList. These are work items that take 3 times our estimation. It has guaranteed bugs. It takes a huge time to deploy and test. It can also be a complex task that we don't understand properly. It is something that mismatches the skill of the current Sprint team. It's the work that has unclear requirements and potential for heavy rework. It's technically outside the scope of our Product Development. It is taking us away from the vision of our company. You have asked the question is Why are we doing this? How much money is it making for us? What is the consequence of not doing it?

3) This one is the core of Product Development. It can be studying the 300 Manager user of Probench and how they use the system. Is there a way to reduce the number of steps in their activities? It can also be creating automatic analysis that would show stats that would remove the work for them completely. It could create client delight and we can show a small popup poll to check that and automatically collect data from our users. Once we create this system that helps you learn more about client behaviour you learn from 10 users per day. You can delight them to share about our products on their social media.?

PS: This one is a guide to developers but the principle can be adopted by the rest of the team too.?

How do we find new clients?

Firstly, I think it was an important question to ask to see if the team can think of contributing. There is two leverage of making this happen 1) More clients means more opportunities for each one to increase billable hours 2) Every new client pays a license fee to use Probench which means each month we add more money to our kitty. which means less effort to earn money and more assurance of a pay hike.?

Let me answer this in 3 parts Past, Present and Future.?

Past: Most of our new clients have come from word of mouth, which means our existing clients tell about our product to their peers and we get new opportunities. This has been possible because of our flexibility of Probench and the friendly support by the support and operation team. We have a few clients whom we reached out and gave a demo of our product. Eg: SPOTT & GCF. In fact, some users from SPOTT went and spoke about us to the client Arabesque. It almost saved us during the pandemic. We do the search for new clients via LinkedIn by searching keywords like Sustainability Benchmark, Assessment, Scorecard, dashboard, ranking etc. It's a trial and error method we reach out to 100 people before speaking to 1 person.?

Present: Apart from LinkedIn outreach using which we have collected 2000 contacts in our CRM. We are building our community of 100 Sustainability Research Analysts. You can read about it on our documentation site https://probench.document360.io/docs/our-community. We have 15 founded members who are helping us create content. They are doing it by giving feedback on the content we have created the recent one being, Can data science be used for testing scoring? https://probench.document360.io/docs/can-datascience-be-used-for-testing-scoring The idea is to create content that includes the intersection of scoring and data science.?

We have got 4 requests for a dashboard while building this community of 20+ people till now. This year our focus is to get word of mouth from the 100 community members. So we need to provide more value to them with the least effort from our end.

Future: The idea is once we create more clarity on our target market and the niche it is down to a few specific variations of our product which is aligned with our vision. We should be able to get people on to our website and convert them into new paying or free clients. We should be in a position to run ads for the product like these https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1VKsaBkJy9g. We would be in a better place to become a technology company if all our fixed cost like Server cost, services cost, salaries and admin cost comes via license fee or subscription fee. The reason for this is to maintain them because more effortless and it will give us enough time so that we can focus more on working towards our vision by creating more innovation.

Our vision is to help every sustainability analyst find insights using data science ~ 73bit

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