If you’re building a product or service, working on a business model, defining an innovation process, or planning to do any of the above, there is something you need to fix first, your team.
But what kind of team do you need to start creating your business?
Working in teams is not always easy. Culture, ego, experience, etc., influence how a team operates. Therefore, it is crucial to select the right people with the right skills. However, before taking a deep dive into the skills you should have in your team, there are three things you need to consider first.
Diversity
Diversity probably sounds like another corporate program, but when talking about innovation, diversity is critical. If the people on your team have similar experiences, cultures, thoughts and appearances, guess what? Opinions, thoughts, and ideas can be very similar as well.
A lack of diversity in your team narrows your perspectives and opportunities and will result in biases going right into your experiments and, worst, your business. So keep diversity top of mind from the beginning. Even better, start with your leadership team.
Entrepreneurial experience
Remember that we learn from success and by making mistakes. Many entrepreneurs need several attempts before succeeding, and from each entrepreneurial journey, you learn something. Having those learnings in your team can facilitate and speed up some processes. Recruit people with some entrepreneurial background and benefit from their experience.
Cross-functional skill set
Like playing with Legos, there are some basic bricks that you must have to build something unique, and those are not all identical! The same happens when building an outstanding team. You will need some basic skills and, of course, they shouldn’t be all the same.
The purpose of having a cross-functional skill set in your team is to help you build, test, and decide faster.
The six skills you must have in your team.
- Design: Consider someone that can think about the user interface, layout, and look of the MVP, prototype, or experiment. A well visually designed Landing Page can influence the decisions of the people. How each element looks, buttons, placeholders, text, images, or any visual interface can affect the result of your experiment.
Pro-tip: Ideally, this person with design skills feels comfortable designing MVPs with no coding tools like Marvel app, Figma, or InVision.
- Performance/ growth marketing: Do you want to drive revenue, user acquisition, and brand awareness? That’s the role of someone with performance or growth marketing skills. When validating ideas, you will need someone hands-on prospecting and remarketing your experiment. Someone very familiar with distribution channels, ads, and organic growth. This person can help you run experiments faster, achieve better results and keep track of the budget.
- Copywriting: It’s been proven that good copy and microcopy can make or break ads, posts, brochures, and landing page performance. A talented copywriter in your team can improve your messaging and customers’ perception of your value proposition.
- Innovation strategy/consulting: Not everyone has the experience or ability to turn an idea into a value proposition. That’s the reason why you need someone with innovation strategy skills that’s able to translate learnings into assumptions and hypotheses into experiments. This person is the team’s foundation and has the vision, understanding, and creativity to plan and manage your innovation efforts.
- Research and data: When validating ideas, information is vital. Your team will face tons of data from different sources: desk research, interviews, and experiments. So it would be best if you had someone able to filter and evaluate information, able to ask good questions, someone, able to go beyond the surface, and able to mine data. A team member with these skills will help you reveal new insights, understand patterns, assess likely outcomes, and accelerate making informed decisions. Do you have someone with data mining skills on your team already?
- Resourcefulness. When you’re innovating or validating business ideas, you will face different roadblocks. The ability to find quick and clever ways to overcome challenges during your innovation journey is a skill that hopefully everyone in your team has. Obstacles and challenges can come from different sources, landing pages, messaging, or invalidated ideas. So the more people collaborating to overcome these challenges, the more perspectives and smart solutions you will get.
Do you have all the skills in your team? If not, we can complement your team.
Cosmos Collective is a validation studio. We have the skills you’re missing to run and validate your experiments!
