The DNA of digital teams (people, roles, skills)

Everyone is a digital builder

The builder ethos is a philosophy that recognizes that outstanding digital experiences start with those who build them. It acknowledges that builders aren’t just the people who code the backend of a new app. Builders are people throughout the organization who use technology to solve customer problems, and everyone has the opportunity to use these tools to work better, faster and deliver more value to customers.  Users, creators and builders are one and the same. The shared characteristics of builders are a high standard for quality and craft, as well as a high standard of care in the outcomes and experiences created for customers, businesses and one another as collaborators. 

But, wait ... exactly who is going to build the new global marketing, agile ecommerce and knowledge base digital delivery engines? How do companies enable, grow, enhance and combine the talent they need to build amazing digital products with Contentful? 

This is the most common question I discuss with our customers as the director of platform strategy at Contentful. After leading 50 Contentful implementations and participating in eight digital transformation initiatives, I think I have the key to answer this puzzle. Or at least a solid starting point for building digital teams that embody the mindset and digital capabilities companies need to be fast and competitive in the digital-first era.

• Watch – What’s possible with Contentful | Contentful

• 5 insights that propel brands into the ranks of digital leaders | Contentful

Building a digital team begins with enabling people who have a growth mindset and favor action. These are people who are:

• Eager to learn, willing to try new things and are not put off by failure

• Customer-obsessed with a strong drive to take ideas and run with them

• Ready to fail small, and fail often, in the pursuit of maximum impact

See how I didn’t mention a dependency on programming skills or technology chops? According to Gartner, “By 2024, 80% of technology products and services will be built by those who are not technology professionals.” And even the most talented technology and software engineers sometimes struggle to make this mindset shift. 

This is part one of the builder ethos: understanding that everyone is a builder simply by demonstrating a growth mindset to test, learn and adapt. 

The people, roles and skills for a world-class digital team

To support cross-functional collaboration and autonomy, I recommend all teams have a mix of strategy, analytics, project management, content, design and engineering skills. The ratio of people needed in each role, and what those exact roles are, change based on the team’s purpose. 

Below are examples of the mix of roles on digital teams. These are meant to serve as a starting point that can be further refined based on your company's timeline, resources, scope and ambition.

From baton-passing waterfall to cross-functional adaptive agile teams

Digital teams need a variety of skills that enable them to work faster and more autonomously than traditional teams. Instead of a string of hand-offs, you want your digital teams to have all the roles and skills they need at one table. This encourages cross-functional collaboration and enables teams to pursue new ideas and bring them to market faster.

Your organization will likely also need a platform that fosters collaboration in this modern, adaptive and agile way. (Consider these factors to evaluate the digital and content platforms that are right for your team’s DNA.)

We’ve all been at awkward meetings where one team excitedly pitches an idea they've been working on for weeks only to have the next team in the delivery process raise dozens of concerns. Typically these concerns have to do with priorities, delays in previous features or templates, not having enough humans, or being inundated with many other tasks in their backlog. 

To build faster, you need to bring people with different skills and perspectives together to share a common goal and objective, and a common roadmap. Cross-functional collaboration avoids the baton-passing and downstream problems — there is no more downstream. The digital team works as one unit to build, compose and launch to customers with speed. 

“Digital business is treated as a team sport by CEOs and no longer the sole domain of the IT department,” says Rajesh Kandaswamy, research vice president at Gartner. “Growth in digital data, low-code development tools and artificial intelligence (AI)-assisted development are among the many factors that enable the democratization of technology development beyond IT professionals.”

As Paolo Negri, co-founder & CTO at Contentful, puts it, “The principle of low-code is really: How can we make available an environment where people can only write code specific to their business? So it’s business logic that is absolutely custom to what they’re doing — it stays in the domain of knowledge for which they are solving.” 

Collaboration doesn’t mean everyone is working together all the time. In my experience, well-functioning digital teams converge and collaborate at times, then work on different parts of the project separately, and then come back together to collaborate more as their individual contributions come together. It's like a continuous pendulum of together, independently, back together — this motion keeps the whole team running smoothly. 

This back and forth between individual work and cross-functional collaboration, encourages interdependent instead of codependent relationships. People are empowered to do their own part, but success depends on a team effort to bring the individual components together as a whole. 

Read More:

• Learn how Atlassian scaled its external support capabilities with Contentful.

• Read more about agile team strategies and approaches.

This post is part of a Builder Ethos Series, see them all:

• Part 1: The DNA of Digital Teams

• Part 2: The DNA of Digital Factories

• Part 3: Digital teams build fast, compose and launch faster