Online: Building Highly Accountable Teams in Times of Crisis

This was an online event. A video recording is available here. Answers to follow-up questions as well as other resources are available at the bottom of this page:

Let’s face it, building a dream team is hard. And even harder in times of crisis. Leaders need to find the right people, give them the right direction, and then let them do the right thing. Teams need to be efficient and collaborative, especially within a remote working environment, and count on each other to get the job done.

This session is for leaders, emerging leaders, and aspiring leaders who want to build amazing teams that can work together to produce extraordinary results. We’ll focus on some essential information leaders today need in order to build teams that are highly accountable and can operate with minimal direction and oversight – especially important in today’s complex world.

Pralad Rao is the Head of Delivery at Architech, a Toronto-based app modernization and innovation company with over 15 years' history creating custom applications leveraging UX, and using open source and cloud-native technologies through an Agile approach. Pralad is engaged in continuously improving project management, product owner, quality assurance, and support disciplines while applying Agile best practices to build and improve upon world-class digital products. Pralad leads a highly adaptable, collaborative, and accountable team of experts in order to provide the best value for clients and their customers. In his 17 years of experience in Delivery, Pralad has assisted in delivering powerful software for startups, scale-ups, and large enterprises.

As a follow-up, here are answers to two of the questions we did not get to (as well as the original recording and other resources):

• Q: From Mark Farmer : How wold you sequence interview types to “fail early” so to speak? To be respectful of candidate time and the time of the interviewers.
• A: There are multiple steps to the recruitment process. It starts with screening resumes which will weed out anyone who isn’t qualified on paper. After that, there is typically a round of phone screening for those with the top resumes. This step is very helpful in narrowing down the candidate selection so that when it comes to interviewing, the team is much more confident in the candidates they are speaking to. Once the interviews start, it’s good to have a first round of interviews with the direct hiring manager.      If the hiring manager does not want to proceed with the candidate at this step, there is no need for any further interviews and you can save a lot of wasted time this way.  I typically ask a lot of probing questions early on in the interview in order to get the best sense of who the candidate is, their personality style, knowledge base, and cultural fit – and I often know right away whether or not I will move forward with additional rounds of interviews with other team members. However, in order to ensure you are giving the candidate the best chance (and giving yourself enough time to evaluate), it’s important not to cut the initial interview short even if you think you have already come to a decision. People spend a lot of time preparing for interviews, so you should always give them a fair chance at it.
• Q: From Wayne Thompson : A time of crisis creates an opportunity for product development/enhancements given the disruption, can you talk to how you have rallied organizations towards a new north star vs. dwelling on current state.
• A: Architech’s product team truly partners with our clients in order to create the best products for them. Our typical way of working is alongside product, technology, or marketing resources at the client’s end, and helping them take their product vision through to execution and delivery. This partnership doesn’t change in the midst of a crisis, however, it does change what we determine to be important in terms of product features and enhancements. Many of our clients are focusing on messaging right now, and informing their customer base of changes to their business operations due to Covid-19. Aside from this, we are proactively coming up with recommendations to our clients to capitalize on the increasing desire of customers to go digital, and have the best digital tools available within their products in order to increase customer engagement. Some clients need to be steered this way (to see the value in enhancing digital tools) while some are quite forward thinking and have made significant investments in their digital products given the higher consumer demand during the crisis.

• The recording of the event can be found here. 
• For more insights about delivery and product design, feel free to check out Architech's blog here.
  
• If you'd like to learn more about how Architech's integrated teams have solved product, design and engineering challenges for their clients, take a look at some case studies here.
  
• You can also follow Architech on LinkedIn, and connect with Pralad directly. We are currently hiring for multiple roles, so don't forget to check out our careers page on how you can be part of our Dream Team.

If you'd like to set up a chat about how Architech can help you build highly-integrated product, design and engineering teams, feel free to reach out to Pralad or info@architech.ca.

Thanks again for attending. We look forward to staying connected!

TPMA Execs & Architech