Introduction…
Lee & I have been growing some startups on the London tech scene for a few years now. We have always used traditional agencies to help us augment our teams which has been great and gave us the flexibility to scale teams up and down as we needed as things changed with only a couple of days notice enabling us to focus on growing a great core team of direct employees complimented really well by a few strategic “contracted” team members. There was always something missing for the indirect team members and a lot of the time they just didn’t feel valued by their main employer even if they loved working with our teams or on interesting products with us. To combat this feeling we decided to spin up an internal agency to specifically to add scale with one-off projects and charged the team out as contractors to our customers. This way the internal team was constant, often pulled on the use of contractors to deliver a specific outcome and once the outcome was achieved the team would fall back to Business as usual… Lee has written more about this HERE. Our main goals in all of this is to help bring together teams of brilliant people that can exceed client expectation in a way that they have not seen before.
Personal note…
During my hiatus from startup land a few years ago, I personally did my time at a large consultancy leading a team of exceptional technologists whilst we delivered some very important work to some very large but “old” thinking clients. The clients were just on the cusp of developing some good digital & technology teams but needed lots of help and suggesting flexible/collaborative ways of working were often pushed back against because that was not the way things were done (because hierarchy). Targets for working in this way from that particular employer would mostly be based on number of people on your project(s), or new projects started with existing clients which is well described HERE – whilst this stuff works in scaling business, because there was no focus on team and relationship building it became one of the major factors for my resignation and step back to startup land. I think experiencing this has helped me to understand the parts of my role that were well received and which were not in an environment that I was not entirely used, but overall gave me the reassurance that I could do things well in organisation, delivery and management of many different type of clients.
“Our mission is to help companies build the right technology and process things in the right way”
What we think good consultancy looks like…
We have decided to build a business that could give our team members the flexibility and security that some of our independent team members have been missing in previous businesses. We have been lucky enough to find some great, highly skilled people who are passionate about what they do and who want to work with us as core team members on this mission. We don’t only want to be a company that’s only interested in “bigger margins” and “cost saving”! We are genuinely interested in the people that choose to work with us and we believe that if those humans are happy, they will do their best work with us, grow professionally and deliver great things for our customers.
Authentic Technologies was born…
A word that came up a lot during the research of this business was AUTHENTIC. The word seemed to fit well for the organisation name which got us thinking about how the word could play into our vision…
- Humans should be able to be their full authentic self at all times
- A company should be honest and authentic in how it treats people and customers alike
- Delivering work in an authentic way will bring true and diverse outcomes, meeting user needs in a far more encompassing way.
“agency life” is different to single product life so we are building the business with purpose around transparent organisational values:
- Team culture (whatever that is!!)
The idea here is that people should be happy working together and not just happy doing work individually (we know that this is also sometimes important). How do we measure this? We don’t know yet but constantly reviewing how we are doing and giving as-well as receiving feedback from each other and customers to always become a better version of Authentic Technologies - Role flexibility
In order for us to do this we need to be able to hire people who are know about a few things, not just be expert in one thing. For example, if you are good at marketing and engineering then we should be able to throw you into the product management role for a week or two or three to just see how it feels and hopefully bring the whole team together as we deliver across multiple varied projects as a business. - Fair remuneration
We have built a very clear skills matrix that starts with core skills that everybody in the team can measure the matrix layers up by role so that each business unit, team and individual can see easily where there are gaps in skills and it should be transparent to see who gets remunerated in what way and for which skills so that you can track your own progression throughout the business or even choose a different path for your career.
Our goal for this business is to empower our customers with the skills they need to run product teams without our help, so the opposite of land and expand.. We want to deliver and minify. Successful work for us should mean that Authentic Technologies are not needed as a supplier to you as a customer once our engagement is complete.
Be Authentic with us…
We are looking to build the Authentic team (direct team as well as through friendly associates) to build a community around the work that we do and to actively promote sharing of how we are approaching problem solutions in different sectors reducing the need to search for this stuff. Who knows, we maybe even start to identify patterns and standards around some of this work for industry at large. If you like the sound of this, then come and join the journey!
Become an Authentic client..
Are you a forward thinking, measured-risk taking customer that is stuck in a product development or has an idea that you don’t know how to get started with or do you just need extra support with a thing that is in flight from a bunch of clever authentic humans?? The types of customers that are an ideal fit for us are the type that don’t mind thinking outside of the box to get to the next stage of their journey and can put trust in a delivery team and a process.
Join our list or contact us about how the way in which we would work with your team could mean the difference between success or failure for your products and projects.
