Key roles of a tech startup and benefit of SkillPal.
By: Sayantan Chatterjee
Tags: Skillpal, Tech Start Ups, Growth, CEO, Technology

A tech startup is a company whose purpose is to bring technology products or services to market. These companies deliver new technology products or services or deliver existing technology products or services in new ways. Hiring qualified people for your startup isn’t enough, either. 65% of startups fail due to management issues. So, when you’re building a startup, it’s about hiring the right people for the right positions, not just those who look good on paper. So, what startup roles are essential for success? I am going to take a look at nine essential roles in a startup company, and what it takes to make each of them successful. According to a SkillPal Expert, The chief executive officer (CEO) of a startup is often referred to as the visionary. The leader of the pack. The decision-maker. Their talent lies in dreaming big and being passionate about what the company could achieve in the future. But that doesn’t mean a CEO is paid more than the rest of the team, and they don’t hold more power.

I am really wanting to tell you what are the key roles in a startup business. But you may need a mentor first to make you understand what the things to do and what not to. A mentor is a person who has a professional and life experience and who voluntarily agrees to help a mentee develop skills, competencies, or goals. Put another way, a mentor is an advisor and role model who is willing to invest in the mentee’s personal growth and professional development. A mentee is someone who has identified a specific personal or professional goal and who believes that the guidance and help of a mentor and being held accountable to the mentor can help them achieve their goal. If you are searching for a mentor SkillPal is the best way.

The SkillPal mentorship is a relationship between two people where the individual with more experience, knowledge, and connections is able to pass along what they have learned to a more junior individual within a certain field. In today’s competitive landscape a mentoring relationship can give you an edge that differentiates you from your peers and/or your competition. You may be ready to make a career change or advance in your present career but something is holding you back. Wouldn’t you benefit from a relationship with someone who may provide knowledge, insight, support, guidance, and open doors for you? It may surprise you that some of the world’s most rich and famous had mentoring relationships to help them in their quest for excellence.

No startup is built on the exact same structure. This is because startups are, by definition, agile, lean, and adept at evolving based on the company need. However, some general role categories seem to recur everywhere. These include:

· Engineers: out of all the positions at a startup, backend engineers are probably the ones who benefit the most clarity. Hackers, born coders and computer scientists are usually technically-orientated, focusing on learning the best programming languages, algorithms and frameworks for the project.

· Product managers: often have engineering backgrounds, but also see the bigger picture. They enjoy analyzing traffic, understand how to prototype and research, and often know their way around various tasks.

· Marketing and sales: the hustlers who will do everything in their power to promote and sell the product to the right audience.

· Business Developers: often lumped together with sales, these positions often become available to more experienced salespeople. There is crossover in the skills, but making deals on a large scale implies strong people skills and an innate ability to network with the right people.

· Legal teams: not always needed for brand new ventures, but primordial for growing startups.

· Human Resources: hiring and firing, but also attracting top talent to fill positions at the company.

Core responsibilities of a startup CTO:

· In the early stages, coding and developing the company’s product

· Developing and fine-tuning the startup’s strategy for using tech resources

· Making sure the tech team is hitting deadlines, and using their time productively and efficiently

· Focusing on ways the backend team can increase product revenue

· Developing and implementing product infrastructure

Kind of obvious from the “visionary” label. A CEOs vision needs to seep into the foundations of a startup. They need to be constantly looking for opportunities for their product in the market, their customers, and find it a place in their chosen industry. 44% of startups fail because there isn’t a market need for their product, so finding a pain point (and fixing it) is a crucial part of a CEOs job. A startup, especially in its early stages, can’t afford to hire consultants and specialists to help make their vision become a reality. That’s why a CEO needs to be a jack of all trades. A startup CTO is a CEOs right hand and helps them fine-tune strategy, tactics, and business goals to push the company forward. In the first stages of the startup, the CTO will be hands-on in the IT/development side of the company, helping to invent the product before the company progresses out of its early-stages.

“A good CEO is constantly questioning whether the right people are in the right places,” says Founder/CEO of Brainscape, Andrew Cohen. “Do any roles need to be re-organized? Are any bad apples affecting the performance of the rest of the team? Do people like their jobs? Do we need to have a corporate team-building retreat at a ropes course? Do we need to create any new vacancies for unmet leadership needs? “Continually optimizing for team fit is a difficult activity, but it pays off exponentially as you put the right people in the right places.”

If I need mentorship or if I need any approval of my work, I will go to SkillPal first to get a Mentor. The person will send me a bite-size video or a live video call. By that, I will improve my work. There are many platforms in India and many people who may provide us with knowledge for free but SkillPal got the best man and woman who can mentor us at the right time with the right clues. The purpose of mentoring is to tap into the existing knowledge, skills, and experience of high performing employees and transfer these skills to newer or less experienced employees in order to advance their careers.