Options to upskill your digital product team, fast

Someone once said, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. Well, when it comes to the tech community things don’t actually go that way. For your company to own the market, upskilling your digital product team is a must. 

The perks are various: getting employees who are ready to meet more difficult challenges, the improvement of efficiency, increasing the team’s productivity, and, as a result, a lower turnover rate by the day. 

This means you (a) don’t lose industry knowledge, and (b) remain at peak productivity. However, it is also important to adopt upskilling to avoid decreasing the quality of your code, unhappy customers, and the negative blow out on your corporate culture.  No great leader wants it, right? 

Now that I have your attention, stick with us to know more about what your options are when time comes to upskill your digital product team, fast. 

Key reasons to upskill your digital product team

When you decide to upskill your digital product team you’re doing much more. You’re actually ensuring that your customers will get exactly what they want from your product, in the most convenient fashion. 

If you want to build better or even new and improved products, having senior experts is fundamental. Can you imagine trying to launch a new project with an unprepared team? Would you really compromise the safety, security, and reliability of your codebase like that? I bet that the answer’s no. 

Furthermore, as a tech leader, you’ll need time to think about more elevated questions. And for that, being able to delegate is essential. Once again: you’ll need more seniors on your team. How to reach these sought-after software experts, though? We’ll dive into that over the next topics. 

Leadership and mentoring: why feedforward matter

Better than only giving feedback is giving your digital product team feedforward. 

The basic difference between feedback and feedforward is that the latter refers to future actions. Feedforward anticipates good practices instead of only giving feedback when things go down to a critical level. 

The most effective way of doing it gives employees perspective to grow and improve on their shortcomings.  It’s all about building a remarkable and positive future, not dwindling on past failures. 

That said, adding new and more senior talents to your team can be a promising vision for the upcoming days. More experienced employees can:

• Turn into a role model to other employees;
• Be an inexhaustible source of knowledge;
• Fasten things up when it comes to an urgent delivery and much more.

By now you can be asking: but what about training and development? Do I really need to consider hiring new people?

Training employees vs. hiring top performers

Of course, and there’s not a single doubt about it: you should invest in training and development for the employees you already have. Yet, that takes time. The process can be faster or slower depending on each individual talent – and you should respect that.

When hiring top performers to upskill your digital product team you get to ramp up your squad faster – due to their level of expertise and also by the standards they’re going to set. Aim for collaborative profiles that will be willing to share what they know with the rest of the team.

Pursuing someone with strong soft skills can also help you as a leader to delegate with no pressing concerns. The more autonomous and independent the team is, the more they will be able to deliver. After all, keeping your company’s culture on track is always important to guarantee a healthy work environment, even from a distance.

But what to go for? Here are some valuable soft skills for Software Developers:

• Proactivity and ownership;
• Accountability;
• Communication skills;
• Empathy;
• Patience;
• Teamwork and collaboration;
• Willingness to learn and improve, always;
• Management of people, time, and projects.

How to find top performers to upskill your digital product team 

In case I really did get your attention, take a look at how Ubiminds’ white-glove service can help you save time and money when upskilling your digital product team. 

We recommend our step-by-step guide on Ubiminds’ sourcing, vetting, and hiring processes. By checking it out you can understand roles, deadlines, and everything that matters.

→ Access step-by-step guide on Ubiminds’ sourcing, vetting, and hiring processes now!

Feel free to also contact us with the form below, we’ll be happy to answer all of your inquiries. 

Scheila Farias Silveira

International Marketing Leader, specialized in tech. Proud to have built marketing and business generation structures for some of the fastest-growing SaaS companies on both sides of the Atlantic (UK, DACH, Iberia, LatAm, and NorthAm). Big fan of motherhood, world music, marketing, and backpacking. A little bit nerdy too!