Team Building in Sydney: How to Build a Development Team despite Your Lack of Technical Knowledge

September 12, 2016

The hiring process is an essential aspect of team building in Sydney. You must choose the people with the right experience, skills and personality to ensure optimum team performance. However, one of the biggest challenges of the hiring process is choosing people for roles in areas you have little or no knowledge of. For example, building a web development team can be difficult if your expertise lies in marketing and business administration. So how can you get through this road block?

Building Your Dream Tech Team

Manish Dudharejia, co-founder of E2m, a full service digital marketing agency and MoveoApps, a mobile apps development company, said while it may be difficult, building a development team without having a technical background is doable. In fact, all successful entrepreneurs have done it, Manish included. Here are some tips to help you out.

1. Logic is vital

Before you go about hiring people for your development team, first you must have a logical understanding of the products you want to develop and the skills needed to build them. For example, if you want to have an e-commerce site so you can sell products online, you must know the technology involved in developing such type of website. This will help you determine what the basic requirements potential candidates must possess are.

2. Use word of mouth

If you want to have the best tech developers in your time, have someone help you find them. Hire through references by asking your friends, current and ex colleagues to recommend someone they know well. Finding great talents through word of mouth is an effective way to build a team of competent tech developers who will help you not only win the Sydney Amazing Race, but help you create products or services that will bring you lots of income.

3. Pay attention during interview

According to Manish, when you are developing a "smart product or smart people," you'd definitely want to have people who are witty and have a great personality in your team. As such, when interviewing potential candidates, pay attention to how they communicate and interact with you. This will give you an idea of how they would communicate and interact with their future teammates.

4. Look beyond programming

While the level of technical skills they posses is an important criteria, Manish said you should look beyond programming if you want to build a high-performing development team. You should give than an instant practical problem to solve and see how they analyse, estimate, and solve it. This will help you determine how familiar with technical concepts and every stage of product development they are.

Action Speaks Louder than Worlds

5. Hire doers, not talkers

As with any role, it's important to hire those who can back their claims with actions. According to Manish, after having interviewed hundreds of developers, he has realised that some who talk big are unable to perform when it's time to show what they are made of. As such, before you hire someone, make sure to ask them this simple question: are you a talker or a doer? This will help you identify the developer you'd want to be part of your team and your team building activities.