I’m Vivian, the Product Lead for A.Team’s company-facing product. My team's mission is to deliver a world-class experience that enables companies to build amazing products with hybrid teams.
So far, we've helped 300 companies assemble some of the world's best product builders into high-performing teams on promising initiatives. I often talk with the founders and leaders of these companies to learn about their challenges. And lately the message has been clear: They want to move fast and build — without capacity blocking them.
When forming great teams, we know that the flexibility to scale your team depending on the skills and resources needed for a specific stage of product development can make the difference between shipping a product on deadline or falling short.
The ability to expand your team has always been part of A.Team’s core offering. But in the past, when a company member requested a team extension to bring on new team members, it would take quite a few steps — with several emails and calls with their Team Advisor.
Now we're making it easy to instantly bring on new team members as a built-in, self-serve feature on the platform.
Solving for the Capacity Problem
Every leader knows what it’s like to lose valuable time looking for the right person or get slowed down by a six-month onboarding process. That can lead to cutting the scope of the product.
For example, in early 2021, Apprentice realized that it needed to build a new version of its software in just 45 days to scale the manufacturing of COVID-19 vaccines. They thought there was no way they could do it in time. Thanks to A.Team’s scale-as-you-go model, they could.
“Within two weeks, we scaled up to 20 engineers. And that was just the first group. We've continued to add more than 50 team members across several products.”
— ANGELO STRACQUATANIO, CEO OF APPRENTICE
We prioritized shipping a self-serve Team Extension experience to empower companies like Apprentice to build what they need, when they need it—removing capacity as an obstacle.
What We're Launching
With Team Extensions A.Team companies are now empowered to add team members with the following features:
- Self-serve extensions: Initiate an extension on existing missions in a few clicks
- Proactive nudges: Get notifications when your team may need an extension
- Multi-role extensions: Add a single role or multiple roles at once
- End-to-end notifications: Stay updated — from request to proposal
How It Works
Now, adding new team members to your A.Team can be done in four simple steps:
Step 1: Initiate a Team Extension request on your active mission
Step 2: Fill in the details about the role(s) you’re looking for
Step 3: Submit the request for review
Step 4: Receive a proposal based on your extension request in 3-7 days
When is a Good Time to Expand Your Team?
With today’s disruptions, there are many reasons you may need to scale up your team. Here are some of the most common ones:
- Add missing expertise: Add new expertise that wasn’t originally planned for.
- Speed up build cycles: Bring extra capacity to ship products faster and handle peak activity such as launches
- Avoid burnout: Use your team members’ timesheets as an indicator for burnout. If you notice timesheets regularly surpassing forty hours per week, it may be time to scale up.
- Check your Team Pulse: The greatest insights on your capacity needs could come straight from your team members themselves on their bi-weekly Pulse.
The Future of Team Extensions
Our mission is to provide the smartest and fastest way to form, manage and scale the most high-performing teams to supercharge your strategic product and tech initiatives.
We started with Team Extensions, but we’re already hard at work, leveraging our TeamGraph technology to deliver actionable insights to monitor and optimize your teams intelligently and easily. Some of the features you can expect later this year:
- Extension Triggers: Our Team Engine will continuously monitor the activity of your team to notify you of potential bottlenecks and over-utilization. We will send you actionable recommendations of the most relevant A.Teamers who would like to join your team.
- Team-driven Extensions: Team members on an active mission will be able to notify you when they believe an extension is needed.
- Near-instant Proposals: We’re integrating the team proposal experience with extensions making it an even faster turnaround to onboard new builders — speeding up the proposal from one week to a couple days.
Ready to try it?
If you’re an existing company member who’s ready to add builders to your existing team, simply sign in to your account. And if you’re not looking to build an A.Team for your next mission, click here to request access.
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