SCALING TEAMS via Volunteer programs:

How can we get really talented, but busy people to take on work outside their day job and inspire more folks to join in?

Have you ever felt there is an opportunity to scale teams by building on the vast talents and expertise? As a PM, we have the unique perspective of seeing the big picture across your peers of engineering manager and directors who have a ton of individual contributors that knows and performs well, but is always competing to stand out from the crowd.

In Amazon, there are few programs where the leadership encourages volunteer programs that enable you to highlight your skills outside of the immediate teams, and in the process get high visibility of senior leadership across Amazon. I had the privilege to own and run a few of such programs. Here is a list of benefits and techniques that you can employ at your organizations to tap into this talent.

Author: Sreeraj Menon

The following are some examples of mechanisms that have helped with getting volunteers and keep them motivated:

• METRICS: To encourage adoption, identifying data points per leader org (e.g. director or VP level) based on ratio of "volunteered vs benefitted" for that service. e.g. if the service is a high customer impacting service, then request at-least 1 representative from that org to volunteer as a call leader or incident commander. The ratio could be based on number of incidents incurred per month. e.g. every 3 incident requires a volunteer, so it doesn’t burn them out.

• TENETS: New program adoption guidelines - set clear expectation on the role and responsibilities of the individual. Document few tenets and principles that can be referenced by the volunteer at anytime.

• TRAINING: Self-service for trainings and onboarding new folks.

• GROWTH: Providing roadmap for their growth and that of the program. e.g. after 15 incidents, promote them to be a trainer and then remove them from on-calls. Create a train-the-trainer documentation.

• RECOGNITION: Regular recognition emails (e.g. monthly is the ideal balance of too many emails vs impactful). The recognition is based on their specific contribution, either by number of years or number of incidents or based on customer feedback.

• MORE RECOGNITION: Tiered medals of service - Diamond for 50 incidents or 3 years; Gold for 25 or 2 years, Silver for 10 or 1 year and so forth.

• SOCIALIZE: Quarterly newsletter to keep the community informed on improving both their and their customer's experience.

• REMINDERS: Channels in social community rooms (Slack channels e.g) with automated notifications on the upcoming on-call schedules, ongoing incidents links or tickets, with references to newsletter, guidelines and top performers.

• AUTOMATIONS: Build automations regularly and listen to feedback:

  1. Auto assignment of individual during on-calls

  2. Send a checklist on their oncall duty auto-populated to the tickets as applicable, so it is readily available regardless of the time of the day when the incident happens.

  3. Regular reports with the metrics, progress towards goals, and recognition.

  
  

  FAQs:

  1. Who is this targeted audience? How is this article relevant to PMI community?

  As a PM, we have the unique perspective of seeing the big picture across your peers of engineering manager and directors who have a ton of individual contributors that knows and performs well but is always competing to stand out from the crowd. 

  2. Can you give me a summary of this article?

  Overall, this article attempts to offer valuable insights for managers and team leaders looking to tap into their organization’s existing talent pool and create opportunities for employee growth and recognition beyond traditional role-boundaries. 

  3. What is the purpose of sharing this article?

  Sharing my experience with building teams, so it can help any leader or manager looking to grow their teams. scaling teams through volunteer programs. By focusing on recognition, clear growth paths, and community building, this method can effectively motivate employees to participate in additional responsibilities. The emphasis on data-driven decision-making and automation aligns well with modern management practices.

  4. Are there any drawbacks of this proposed approach?

  It’s important to note that while volunteer programs can be beneficial, they should be implemented carefully to avoid overworking employees or creating an expectation of unpaid extra work. The success of such programs likely depends on the organizational culture and the perceived value of the additional responsibilities.

  
  

  5. Who are volunteers? What do you mean by volunteers? Why are volunteers in a corporate org? Are they not getting paid?

  In large scale companies there is a challenge to stand out in the crowd. There are way too many of senior managers and program managers and product managers. How can you get more visibility and how can you managers promote you if there are so many of you vying for that director role? Volunteers are essentially those who go above and beyond the daily tasks by engaging in a role that helps scale the teams. E.g. when there are 1000s of applications and services how can you handle operational challenges. Who is the DevOps engineer or leader? Operations is usually a super small group of handful engineers who are busy fire fighting. To avoid fire fighting they need better partnership from the application teams. When there are outages or high severity incidents you need better participation from the application dev community to proactive engage and present incidents or mitigate incidents. Operation engineers cannot scale enough to handle 1000s of services nor it is sustainable. Plus they also strive to help with building automation to improve incident management. By providing your time to volunteer and help out the operations teams you are scaling entire organizations!