Key Tech Team Predictions for 2022: What to Expect
As we enter 2022, Marko Gargenta, former founder of Twitter University and now CEO of PlusPlus, an all-in-one platform that enables technical teams to unlock and share key organisational know-how, reveals his five tech predictions for the year ahead.
The job market will remain tight
The world economy remains hot as governments continue to invest in infrastructure. As a result, there’s an extraordinary amount of growth, with technology remaining the key driver and the demand for technical talent rocketing.
Much of that talent’s future will be subject to the implementation of successful remote working strategies. The pandemic forced us to move to working online quickly, but many businesses haven’t quite figured out the optimum way of doing so yet.
It’s helpful not to think of remote working as binary (remote or in-person), but rather as different levels of remote working. For example, L1 would be the traditional 9-5 five-day working week in an office, and L5 would be a company that was designed from the ground up to be remote-first. Covid forced L1 to L2 transformation, as few companies have gone beyond just moving meetings to Zoom.
Team effectiveness will matter more and more
A tight talent market and a new approach to teamwork will mean that effectiveness of teams is more important than ever.
But, what does that mean and how do you measure it in the knowledge economy? Productivity is easy to measure — it’s the output, i.e. the number of widgets we ship. Yet, we care about the outcome of all that busy work. This becomes harder to reason about — yet that’s the true effectiveness of the team.
Maintaining team alignment at scale will still be tricky
As technical organisations scale, the number of communication channels between team members grows quadratically. In other words, there are n-square ways to communicate for n being the number of teammates. This is why things are easier when businesses are small, but can quickly get out of control as teams scale.
Shared understanding unlocks team yet it is elusive
Making sure everyone knows what work to do is one thing, but actually completing tasks the right way is another. Technology and processes are getting ever more complex. How do you then capture and share these best practices?
For teams to understand how their work relates to the value they create (something a-players especially strive for), it is important to have that understanding end-to-end: from customers all the way to the people implementing it. This adds more surface area to cover.
In addition to capturing and sharing the best practices, it’s important to treat them as living insights. As such, feedback loops are important to ensure the new best ways of delivering value connect back to the source of truth and are captured.
All of this is complex. To support it, organisations need knowledge systems that provide the backbone of such technical enablement. Tech Enablement is a deliberate, ongoing initiative which sets up technical employees for success at scale. It does so by unlocking the internal company knowledge that is stored in the experiences of long-standing employees.
Tool fatigue and the rise of platforms
To do their best work, teams will increasingly rely on various tools. However, what’s changing in recent years is the ecosystem of such tools.
The rise of cloud computing caused a massive shift in internal systems, with companies switching to best-of-breed tools for various needs. This shift seemed fine, until the number of such tools started creating confusion, striking the question: where do I go for what?
The pendulum is now swinging from the best of breed tools to integrated platforms that do more, yet possibly don’t go as deep into any of the specifics. These good-enough platforms promise simplicity through integration and trade the bells and whistles in exchange for it.
PlusPlus has bottled up best practices that leading companies use to execute and sustain their ability to scale high-performance teams. For more information, visit plusplus.co.
