The Balance Between Specialism & Diversity

A while back, we wrote a blog post detailing how we’ve been successful as a team, because we’ve allowed the individuals on the team to specialize in the stuff that they’re most passionate about. This however comes with one proviso: there’s still a to-do list and all the tasks need to be completed; so everyone can’t *just* do what they want or feel like on any given day.

The way to achieve this, is to balance out the specialist skills by also diversifying the skill set you have available on your team. This should be done in two ways (using the example of a web design / development agency or most online startups):

1. Make sure that you have a good balance between designers & developers on the team, but furthermore a balance between designers who prefer Photoshop over CSS, and CSS over Photoshop. Similarly make sure that you balance out PHP or WP or jQuery skills on the team, so that you can cover all of your bases equally well.
2. If you have a developer who is great at PHP, have a secondary developer who is almost as great at PHP, but prefers to do mostly jQuery work. You do this as a contingency plan to make sure that if your #1 guy is away from work for weeks (due to illness for example), the team can still function without him or her. Neither diversity or specialism should come at the expense of making sure that the team can still function when some of the team members aren’t present. That’s just silly & semi-suicidal.

For us, the best example of how we apply this at WooThemes is that 2 of the 3 co-founders can take a couple of days off, without hampering the business as the 3rd co-founder is capable of dealing with everything. Sure, we’re less productive then, but as a basic contingency everything can still function properly and our customers don’t lose out in any way.