In the 3 years that WooThemes has existed, our little team has grown to 9 ninja’s. During this time, we think we’ve done a pretty decent job of establishing a team of individuals who have managed to take the business forward in leaps & bounds.
There’s one main reason that has contributed greatly to this success: we’ve allowed the individuals on the team to specialize in the tasks & activities that they are most passionate about, and most skilled at.
In a conversation recently Jeff summed that up quite nicely:
Biggest lesson for me is focusing on your key area – Cobus is better at CSS and frontend than I am, whilst I’m better at PHP, backend, and JS. It ends up being a better product because of us playing to our strengths.
This has the effect that whilst many of us share a few communal tasks, we tend to spend most of our time doing the things that we are best at. Take Magnus, Mark & myself – as the co-founders of WooThemes – as a great example of this: when we started out, all 3 of us were doing everything, yet that has changed greatly these days…
Along with designing & development, Magnus is involved with quality control of the themes and the support, because he is great at spotting bugs and generally fine tuning the themes. Mark sticks to mostly designing and front-end development, whilst taking care of theme documentation (which he admittedly hates, but is great at) and all of our design processes and outsourced collaborations. Finally, I’ve stopped designing & coding completely (I found out that the other guys are *much* better than I am) and I focus on the administrative, business development and marketing side of the business. Simple specialization.
The result of this is not only that the whole WooTeam is happy, because they get to spend most of their time doing the stuff they love, but this is also optimized & efficient. Mark & I would for example not be able to do quality control as quickly and effectively as Magnus; so if we could quantify our time to a $ amount, we’d find that Magnus’ is more cost-efficient on that task. Same goes for any other task in and around WooThemes.
If you’re on a team, allow your team to specialize and grow into a specific area in your business. Yes, sometimes someone (or everyone) needs to take care of the less awesome work, but only because someone needs to do it. The benefit of however having a passionate team, doing the best job they can in their specific little corner of your business is a massive advantage and one that should most definitely not be missed.
14 Responses to “The WooTeam of Specialists”
Lesson #1: So many people worry about improving their weaknesses… I’m with you guys – focus on your strengths and maximise them. You can’t be good at everything, no matter how hard you try.
Lesson #2: You are allowed to enjoy what you do…! The test I always use and often ask others – “Do you leap out of bed every morning?” Such a simple question and the answer tends to reveal how you’re feeling about your job as much as anything else.
Cheers,
Mark
#1 comes with a proviso though: you’ve got to diversify the skills on the team, so that everything (all aspects of the business) gets the same amount of love. But that’s a lesson for another WooLesson post.
Oh joy, WooLessons is exactly what I asked for back when you guys asked us what we’d like you to blog about. A-w-e-s-o-m-e.
It just shows we do actually listen.
We can’t necessarily always respond immediately and roll out new requests, but great ideas – such as this one – sits, simmers and when we eventually get the time to launch it, we plan on doing a really great job of it!
Hi Adii – I’ve already commented above – but to answer your Tweet just now… I’ve a few online ventures – but I’d love to learn how you started to get momentum in the early days in this woo lessons series.
The business I link to on this comment is a few weeks old, we’ve some fabulous big corporates using the service and our first few smaller customers on board – so it’s been tried and tested and really works.
January was always going to be the time to ramp up our activities from a traffic perspective and we’re just starting out with a plan.
What was the key to your success? Following a process? Being smart? SEO, PPC, blogging, high profile reviews, a combination? At what point did you see the Tipping point arrive?
Love your insight – I’ve massive respect for what you’ve achieved and how you go about running the business.
Cheers,
Mark
Thanks for the questions; I’ll attempt to answer them in some upcoming WooLessons posts.
I really envy that you are able to distribute tasks economically and let people specialize in what they love most (or just do best).
for now the volume of my business is such that I can’t afford to specialize in only design and CSS and I have to manage everything myself, including the darned documentation! Oh well I still love my job but its nice to learn from you guys that life can get even better for freelancers.
cheers
Jurriaan – sooperthemes.com
Wow, awesome blog structure! How long have you ever been blogging for? you made blogging glance easy. The entire look of your site is great, neatly as the content material! Executive Elite, 18a Greycoat Gardens, Greycoat Street, London, SW1P 2QA, 028 2088 0135
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