The Striker
The Project's 'Make it Happen' Hero
Hey, fellow Leader 🚀,
I am Artur and welcome to my weekly newsletter. I am focusing on topics like Project Management, Innovation, Leadership, and a bit of Entrepreneurship. I am always open to suggestions for new topics. Feel free to reach me on Substack and share my newsletter if it helps you in any way.
In football terms (the real one - the sport where a player plays the ball with their foot), the striker is the forward position, typically making the role of scoring a big portion of the team’s goals. Therefore, is normally the player whom supporters hope to see scoring in a context of a tight game where the victory can go anywhere on both sides.
In Project Management terms, I consider the striker as a developer who pushes the project forward or resolves within the crucial moments. As in football and in project management terms, it’s very difficult to recruit a good striker for our teams. It might appear to be a goal scorer, however the developer might not adapt well to the organization, project context, etc. Meaning it’s a very difficult role to recruit and is immensely useful for any project.
While building a development team is important to have a certain number of different profiles: some juniors, some mediors, and seniors. While building a team we are hoping that some of the seniors would fill the void and at least one becomes a striker. However, not all seniors are made to lead, score goals, be there at 20h to finish a critical feature and deploy it in Production, and be available the next day at 7h30 if needed. Not all seniors have the ability to explain to stakeholders where and why the Project has an error in the system and how the solution will be fixed. This typically is the role of the Technical Leader or the Technical Architect. Unfortunately, I have seen too many Architects lacking communication skills but awesome in their description of how technology X is great for fixing a problem that nobody cares about.
That’s why I feel important to identify the strikers on my project and care for them as best I can. Because when the time comes, are they the ones who will help the most in bringing the results and the KPIs to the project.
To note that is not that easy to find this kind of engineer. It is hard to have a good striker. It’s even harder to see a good striker leave because the company didn’t value them as much.
That’s it. If you find this post useful please share it with your friends or colleagues who might be interested in this topic. If you would like to see a different angle, suggest in the comments or send me a message on Substack.
Cheers,
Artur