When hiring specialists for banking technology product development, you need to have a clear vision of what people you need there in your team. Whether you’re going to outsource, hire an in-house team, or create a team of freelancers, you must have a clear vision of the job positions and their responsibilities and skill set required to complete the job well. In this post, we’ll take a look at the most critical team roles in your software development team, their primary responsibilities, and must-have skills. Let’s start with the leading position that comes right after a chief executive officer (usually a company founder).
Chief technical officer
A Chief technical officer (CTO) is a person who makes the most important decisions that concern main technologies during the banking software development process. The position doesn’t have strict rules that define the responsibilities of such a person. For instance, the main responsibility of David Singleton, a CTO of Airbnb, is to lead the corporation’s global engineering efforts. At the same time, Thuan Pham, a CTO of Uber, is mainly responsible for growing the development team when it is in the scaling phase.
Despite such a difference in the responsibility list of a CTO in different companies, we still can name a few main duties they need to fulfill:
- Being a technology leader who makes critical decisions concerning the chosen technology strategy
- Organizing the workflow of the development team
- Resolving technical issues
- Ensuring the technology of a company can meet its business objectives
- Hiring/firing engineers when necessary
When looking for a really cool CTO, you can face a lot of obstacles. One of them is usually high celery that experienced CTOs demand. If you can’t afford such a specialist, you can start your search among experienced and ambitious engineers. Another workable solution is to hire a software development team that can play CTO’s role in your company.
Traits to look for in a CTO
Apart from in-depth knowledge of technologies, the position of a CTO implies a list of soft skills, such as:
- Ambitiousness
- Leadership
- Empathy
- Communication
- Self-awareness
All these traits should be paired with a strong desire to create an outstanding product and faith in the team.
Business analyst and project manager
First of all, let’s draw a line between these two positions. Despite a list of similar responsibilities (risk assessment, goals definition, etc.), business analysts and project managers have different purposes on a banking software development project. Business analysts have to research the market and align the product to the market needs, while the project manager’s main responsibility is to make sure that the project development goes smoothly, without broken deadlines, over budgeting, and team burning out.
When looking for a business analyst for your project, make sure this person knows how to work with requirements, stakeholders, market analysis, and is able to process large amounts of data.
A great product manager should be able to effectively manage a team, be result-oriented, and energetic.
Software engineers and QA specialists
Software engineers and quality assurance specialists are the people who literally build a software product. Software engineers get a detailed description of how a product should work and translate these requirements into lines of code. QA engineers, on the other hand, make sure that the features created by developers work exactly as they are supposed to.
It may seem that software engineers and testers bring minimal input into the product. Nevertheless, the Agile software development methodology recommends engaging QA and software engineers during the planning phase for several reasons. Firstly, developers and testers have a better understanding of the product and how it should work. Secondly, they can make suggestions concerning user experience, innovative technologies, development approaches, and more.
There’s another group of specialists who should also participate during the planning phase. These are UX and UI designers.
UX/UI designers
UX/UI designers are people (on small projects, it can be one person) who create a visual part of a software product and make sure that the user experience is excellent. It’s a common mistake to think that all designers are responsible only for colors, fonts, and element placement on a screen. Such a visual representation of a software product is mainly a responsibility of a user interface designer.
User experience designers need to make sure that it’s easy and intuitively understandable how to use a software program. For these reasons, UX designers start their work with research to figure out how similar products work and how to make your product even better. After that, they create user flows and sitemaps to make sure that the navigation is clear and intuitive and to figure out how to place all elements so that end-users could easily find them. Then UX designers create wireframes and prototypes to test every idea and choose the best one.
If you want to find UI and UX designers who can add tremendous value to your product, you need to search for business-oriented people with critical thinking who can generate ideas, test them, and offer only the best ones.
Wrapping up
All the specialists we’ve mentioned above are great to have but not a must-have for your banking project. One person can play several roles, especially if the product is small. The most important here is to find people you can trust. Otherwise, you’ll end up micromanaging every detail instead of moving forward to product success.
Story by Paul Belogour. Belogour is an experienced IT entrepreneur with a laser focus on Fintech-related projects.
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