Orgspace Insiders Update #22 - Introducing New Team Formation Experience
Orgspace (defunct)
Orgspace is a people management platform for software organizations focused on the needs of operational leaders.
We’re excited to announce our public launch - as we’ve reached General Availability! We’ve been working behind the scenes to address all the feedback we’ve received from you, our insiders. Today, we go live with features designed to not just help you get started, but to really highlight how Orgspace can help you understand your organization in new ways. Today we are featuring the following:
If you’ve been lurking and not yet onboarded, or if you have and want to check out the new capabilities, visit?orgspace.io/register?today!
New Team Formation Experience
In the last year since we started to get early feedback from our design partners, one of the things that stood out was realizing that most leaders will start with a traditional org chart and use Orgspace to create their first team chart. While this was possible before, it was often challenging to focus on one team in the context of an entire team chart. Our new team formation experience is designed to help you staff a single team, allowing you and your management team to craft the perfect set of teams that address your product needs.
One of the things you will notice in the new experience is the presence of a time based view. This allows product leaders to capture nuance around temporary moves between teams to support critical initiatives, as well as staggered starts for things like open positions. For professional services firms using Orgspace, this is critical, as staffing often depends on start dates for new work that aren’t always clear as new work gets underway on timelines that aren’t always certain.
How Distributed Is My Team: Introducing Geospread
Before founding Orgspace, both Brian and I led teams that often spanned many geographies. At one point, I once had teams in the US, India, South Africa, Brazil, and Turkey all at the same time. In most of these cases, a given team would be in a single geo, but coordination was done globally across geos. However, one of the trends I certainly noticed was that throughput tended to go down when the level of geographic team distribution went up. While this wasn’t always the case, especially in teams that were well established with good practices around distributed work, it certainly was a trend worth looking at.
Geospread?is our metric that simply means?average number of timezones any one person is away from every other team member at a given point in time. With Geospread, the goal is to capture how difficult it may be to hand off work to a colleague in real time. If there are few shared timezones between team members, the team is going to need to be much more proficient in async work. There is also a risk that lack of shared hours can slow down work due to some team members being blocked.
When thinking about this from the broader organizational point of view, we want to see which teams are more or less distributed. To help with that, we brought in the lens concept.
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Lenses provide a simple means to quickly scan teams that meet a given criteria, such as Geospread within a given range. In our UI, we color code the teams that have different levels of spread when using the lens so you can quickly understand where you might consider focusing your analysis.
The Geospread lens is the first of many lenses we are coming out with in the coming months. Need a specific lens over which you want to scan your org and teams? Reach out and we can get it in!
Offices and Regions
Lastly, we’re excited to announce the introduction of offices and regions into Orgspace. Offices and regions unlock a number of capabilities, both current like Geospread, and planned like cost projection rules that can specify a geographic specific costs used when planning global teams. When creating an office, just select the address, and we can infer the timezone and other details automatically.
In the future, look for more uses of this data, such as answering questions like “how does move from locality X to Y affect my cost structure and talent pool” or “what locations tend to have in the longest team tenure”.
Only the Beginning
While this note marks the general availability of Orgspace, our product team continues to evolve and add to the product every day. More integrations, more ways to view your data, additional things like geographic views, multi-currency cost projection, and more features like this are all on the backlog.
Thank you for coming on the journey with us. We’re just getting started!
-Aaron, Brian, and the Orgspace Team