Team imbalance – Pitched

There are two ways your team can have an imbalance, but both come from not understanding the “shape” of the work you need to do. Do you have estimates for your big picture or road map? (More about estimates in another post, but google Cone of Uncertainty for now). Do these estimates break down by work type and by level of difficulty? If so then you should be able to do a little bit of maths and see what an “average” piece of work looks like. Is it more weighted to Front End dev or is it more Back End? Is most of your work needing a genius or do you have mostly straight forward build work that juniors can perform. If your team shape differs from your average work shape then you'll either be inefficient (using racehorses instead of cart horses) or more than likely you'll always find yourself waiting for the right dev to be available. Do you constantly find yourself saying “that particular job will need <insert hassled developer name here>”? Time to look at the shape of your work and team!