Missing seniority
I thought for a very long term whether to write that post or not. The reason why thinking is that it should not be a claim for people with more experience like me, it is a claim for more seniority and you can gain that seniority even earlier.
BUTÂ – and ofcourse there is a huge but – you never can run a good product launch project without seniority. This happens all days to all different types of companies, small enterpreneurial ones as well as large corporates. Define who you gonna go with before what to do and make sure you have the right skills and expertise on board upfront. If you, for example come to a point during a project that e.g. the PO or the Scrum Master is lacking expertise thus getting ignored or absorbed makes it much harder to change and refresh than spending some more time at the beginning.
If he/she lacks methodolgy, ok, get her a training, but you cannot train expertise and seniority and especially not within a week or month! There exist plenty of good people out there being well educated but not skilled, there are others doing a job for 6 months and gain a lot of insights and there are others working for 20 years more or less without thinking. This means for you that you do not search for a special age category nor for a special educated one. Education and age can be an indicator, but not the total truth. You have to search for the excellence by talking to them, becoming inspired by their drive and capabilities. Than you know you are right. For people there is one special rule you should always take care on: If you are not 100% sure, than leave it. You should never change the organisation to make the one fit. Either he/she fits into culture, climate and organisation or not. It is up to him/her.
Seniority
Yes you know, you will need them. You will need that crazy guys talking about systems, services, processes and tasks you potentially have never heard about before. And yes, they will let you know who the Know How owner is. And yes, you will need them cause:
- your Know How can only be scaled up if you have people which already transformed an idea to a working business.
- your Know How can only be pushed onto next level if you have people in place which have already seen the next level.
- there is compliance demand out there and you need people who know how to work with.
- and you will need technical, organizational and even cultural guidance.
This should never be an anthem on old, hard working before, employees. Seniority means that those people have seen different company cultures, different levels of expertise and they know how to transform. Potentially 3 years are enough, maybe 20 or more maybe they never reach seniority level. It really depends on the person, it’s personality, attitude, behaviour and culture (those famous ABC).
You will not need hundreds of Seniors, maybe one or two but you will have to enable them to transfer their knowledge to the teams and to you.
So keep in mind, even if you are the founder, funder, owner or whatever CxO, you will need to have an ear for them, their ideas, their expertise. If you can enable them, they will enable your organization based on the values and objectives you showed them as being important for your business model.
Not having Seniors means trying to create the wheel an extra time and loosing time, resources, nerves and money. Young rebels are good, focused your rebels make the business.
Tom Peruzzi's thoughts on digital, innovation, IT and operations 
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