November 5, 2020

5 things we did before hiring a tech lead

We knew from the early days of Local Welcome that technology would help us to develop and grow our meals. It’s part of why the Lottery funded us.

Hiring a tech lead - a person to write the code to bring our ideas to life - has always been part of our plans. We assumed that we would hire a tech lead back in 2018 after we got our money from the Lottery.

But now it’s 2020 and we’ve still not hired a tech lead. It’s been an unexpected path and we’ve learned a lot about how to grow our charity using technology. So here’s five things we did before hiring a tech lead:

1. Started with humans, not with technology

Local Welcome meals are rooted in human contact and connection, not in the tech that helps to make them happen. 

When we originally began thinking about how to help communities to welcome refugees, the idea sprung from the groundswell of humanity and compassion felt by people when the image of the drowned little boy, Alan Kurdi, appeared across our frontpages. 

It’s the idea - local people cooking and eating with refugees who are new to the community - that attracts people to what we do. The tech behind our meals isn’t what matters to our leaders, members and guests, it’s the face-to-face human interactions and sense of belonging that keeps them coming through the doors each month.

As an organisation we may be steeped in principles from the tech world - agile, lean and human centred design - but these are not front and centre to people’s experience of Local Welcome, and neither should they be. 

So unlike many tech startups, where the technology is a core part of the founding idea, we started with a human-centred idea.

2. Tried to hire a tech lead in 2018

Yup, we did actually try, and we failed. 

When we got our first big grant from the Lottery we were really excited about the prospect of finally being able to bring in a tech person, to get coding, to get building, to get something out into the world. The problem is, we didn’t know what that something would be. 

We had a tech advisor at the time who asked awkward questions like ‘what do you actually want your tech lead to do?’. Spoiler alert: we did not have a good answer to that question. We went ahead anyway, advertising for the role with no mention of what the person would actually be doing. 

We interviewed some great candidates but by the end of the process something didn’t feel right and we made the decision not to hire. It felt terrifying at the time - it was hard-wired into us by that point that we needed a coder - but with hindsight it was one of the best calls we’ve made. 

3. Grew our startup using off-the-shelf software

Not having a tech lead to write our own code forced us to look at what tech was already available ‘out-of-the-box’ for us to use, and we ended up finding plenty of great options. 

We use Hubspot as our CRM (after negotiating a hefty discount), Stripe to take payments and Eventbrite for people to book onto our meals. The interesting thing is that we knew this stuff existed before we tried to hire a tech lead but we had still been seduced by the desire for our very own techspert. 

All the systems we use are super powerful, highly automated, customisable without the need for code and talk to each other with a little help from Zapier. They took us from 0 to 8 groups and they’ll take us to 20 groups and beyond, no problem. In reality, it would take a team of coders years to build these kinds of tools from scratch, so why reinvent the wheel?

Also, coders are expensive, especially if you are a charity!

Yes, there are some trade-offs because the systems we use haven’t been built to the exact specifications of Local Welcome, but when you compare the cost of service subscriptions to a 4-day-a-week tech lead over two years, it’s a no brainer. 

4. Tried to automate things and got it wrong

When we launched the new model for our meals in January 2019 (the first time we asked leaders and members to pay to attend) we designed a beautiful user journey that we were really pleased with. And it failed. We made an error early on of inviting people to their first meal for free, then asking them to sign up to lead or be a member and pay from then on. It was an unintentional bait and switch that no number or emails or SMS nudges could fix. 

We changed our tactics and launched a different user journey that was upfront about what we expected from our leaders and members from the get-go. We also asked them to pay to attend meals from the start.

It worked. At our first meal in Cardiff, zero people who attended signed up to be leaders. When we tried again with the new approach, our conversion rate was 65 percent. As we’ve continued to iterate, it’s consistently been between 50-75 percent.

If we had a tech lead from the start, we’d have kept them very busy coding a user journey that failed. Instead we put together our first version pretty quickly using Hubspot and Eventbrite and when we needed to iterate, it was simple to do so. This was only one example where we radically changed our use of technology as we learned how to operate our meals.

Now we have confidence in our system and understand its strengths and challenges in greater depth, we can be much clearer on where (and where not) a tech lead can add the most value. 

5. Overhauled our HR policies

We’re a young charity and we’ve only recently developed and written our policies on pay, job descriptions and recruitment. We’ve also been doing some deep work as a team on our equality, diversity and inclusion policy and practises. 

Our goal is to eradicate ‘jobs for the boys’. We’ve done away with salary ranges (so that bolshy negotiators don’t get paid more) and we have a series of clear written guidelines on pay rates, pay rises and conditions of employment that apply to everyone in our team. 

All this means that when we do hire our new tech lead, they’ll join us in a fair, clear and transparent way. The pay is the pay. The conditions are the conditions. There’s no vague ‘competitive salary’, ‘salary based on experience’ or awkward haggling after the job offer. 

We’re confident that this will attract people who want to work for a charity with many great reasons to join beyond good pay (even though we are proud to pay our people well). 

We’re also working on taking positive action in recruitment, proactively promoting vacancies in diverse spaces and networks that are new to us, because we want to prioritise hiring people who share our values, not our backgrounds. 

Don’t copy others, walk your own path

If we’d told our 2018 selves that we wouldn’t hire a tech lead until 2021 we’d have been appalled. We were caught up in the ‘technology will save the world’ narrative. We looked to organisations like GDS who had built technical capabilities in-house. We thought we needed our own codebase.

Not hiring a tech lead was not a strategic decision. We blundered into it through a failed recruitment process which then forced us to look around for other solutions. And thank god we did because this was way cheaper and more flexible than we expected.

Along the way we’ve learned the importance of starting with the simplest solution first, that being grounded in tech principles doesn’t have to mean writing your own code, and that to attract people who share your values, you have to recruit them through a process that exemplifies them. Those are big lessons for us.

We will be hiring a tech lead in 2021. We’ll need custom code to scale from 20 to 100 groups and we can’t do it without a tech lead. When we hire we’ll know exactly what we need and we’ll use a fair hiring process. We’re excited!