Creating an environment where skills can be utilized appropriately

-Please tell us the background to the development of Zipteam.

Yoshikawa: "By properly assigning personnel through SaaS, I hope to raise the baseline of the results that teams produce."

I have worked as an engineer in several companies, and at one of them I felt that "Engineers were rotated too much." Even though they are called engineers, there are actually many different types, such as software and hardware. If we compare them to chefs, each has a completely different area of expertise, like a Thai food stall or a high-end French restaurant.

However, it is difficult to give detailed information about each person's specialty and skills to managers who assign members, so it is cruel to say, "You should know this much." Just as engineers don't know much about sales work or the skills required, the resolution of other job types is usually low.

However, for some reason, some engineers and salespeople are mistakenly thought of as versatile and adaptable. As a result, they are lumped together with others and asked, "You're a chef, so you can cook, right?" This leads to mismatches, especially in large companies, such as someone who is good at street food being put in charge of a high-end restaurant. Furthermore, if someone who is inappropriately rotated starts "pretending to be able to do it," everyone becomes unhappy.

On the other hand, in small and medium-sized companies, it is not uncommon for one person to have a lot of things. There was a DevOps engineer at the company where I used to work, but there was no one else who was familiar with DevOps, so we left everything to him. Later, when he decided to leave the company, we panicked, wondering, "What will he no longer be able to do?" In the end, we all worked together to somehow list his duties, but we couldn't hire someone as talented as him again, so the remaining members divided the work manually.

In this way, it is not uncommon for an ace to leave a team due to retirement or rotation. There are probably not many managers in the world who can anticipate this, understand each person's skills, and prepare for appropriate team restructuring. If the vacant hole is filled up haphazardly, everyone will be unhappy. From an engineer's perspective, I have come to think that such a situation should be avoided.

I think that team composition would be more accurate if you actually talked to the members, but when you have thousands of employees, that's not realistic. That's why you need to use a SaaS like Zipteam that can manage information in order to make it scalable.

-- Have there been any services that solve these problems up until now?

Yoshikawa: That's right. HR software is often linked to skill management, but I think the details of the skills actually used in the field are out of scope. That's because it's the managers of each department who manage those skills. If the HR software skips a step, the correct skill data won't be collected, and there will be a discrepancy with what the field wants to do.

I think the word "HR" is also a cause, but I think both HR staff and the field staff have the misconception that "everything related to people is handled by HR". This is very Japanese, and for example, at Google in the United States, HR authority is more decentralized. Currently in Japan, there is no software that can overcome this situation, and I feel that services that are in line with traditional large companies and are focused on HR.

I once had the opportunity to look at a list of my skills that a company had made for me. It was a very long list, but there was no mention of ROS (Robot Operating System), which I had learned in a research lab and used as a tool at the time. The company I was working for at the time probably wanted to focus on other skills, but the research lab highly valued ROS. It may be difficult for existing services to resolve such gaps.

-What do you keep in mind when developing Zipteam?

Yoshikawa: I'm repeating what someone else said, but I am conscious of whether or not the product tells a story.

For example, if you just hand someone a toolbox, they will wonder, "What should I do with this?" Our ideal is for the user to have a clear idea of what to do when they open the toolbox, and for the user to have a reasonable degree of freedom. For example, one function allowed users to register an infinite amount of data if they wanted to, but we decided to limit it to 30 because we thought, "It would be safer to have a limit, and we could still do what we wanted."

We're not UI/UX experts and are constantly learning, but we pay close attention to things like arranging menus in a way that makes sure low-priority areas don't stand out.

On the other hand, we try not to take all user feedback too literally. There is a famous story about a company that once developed CD players in a variety of colors and publicly recruited testers to survey them to see which color they liked best. Although the testers responded to the survey with responses such as "yellow is bright," when they were told to "please take home one that you like," they all chose black.

When users give us feedback, we tend to be in "good-faith mode." We take their true intentions seriously, but we also try not to be too shocked when they say things like, "X is unusable."

However, Team Up (team formation) is two steps ahead of the functions that users need, and to be honest, I think we may have created it too early. As with IoT and DX, it is difficult for the world to immediately accept cutting-edge things. 

At Zipteam, we understand the parts of skill visualization that people may have trouble with, so we provide the necessary functions based on that understanding. And beyond that skill visualization is team building. However, the world has not yet reached the next step of "wanting to visualize skills." In that situation, we have already created the function that should be used two steps ahead, team building.

Despite this situation, we were able to release this feature thanks to the cooperation of our customers who had already taken two steps ahead.

--Whatdo you think is needed for the world to get one or two steps further?

Yoshikawa: Actually, I think there are some early adopter companies that are already on the way. Competitors are starting to appear in the skill visualization area, so I hope they will get excited about that too. We would like to get the cooperation of authorities and send out a message about the importance of skill visualization.

Respect for the individual is also an important mission

--Who would you like to see use Zipteam?

Yoshikawa: Broadly speaking, I think of it in three stages: CXO, department managers, and individuals. In companies that use so-called HR software, it is not uncommon for people to say, "I entered that I'm an engineer, but I'm sent to support." It takes a fair amount of time to enter information, and the return rate of benefits to users is low. However, I'm sure there is a place for everyone where they can shine as individuals. That's why I wanted to provide benefits to users from the beginning.

For individuals, having someone correctly recognize you will increase your presence within the company, and if you are about to be assigned to a team where you cannot utilize your skills, you can refute that by using a visualized skill graph. This data will lead to the assignment of appropriate personnel, so I think it will be useful for managers, and it will also eliminate the invisible gap from the CXO's perspective that "the field should have been doing well...", eliminating the cost of hiring consultants and increasing the productivity of the entire company.

-- Thinking about it again, I think there are a lot of problems caused by not making skills visible. There are also many cases where you think, "This person's experience and skills could actually be put to good use in the next department."

Yoshikawa: That's right. As a result, it's not uncommon to end up only working with people you know. That's not a bad thing, but I think it's a waste not to be able to utilize the potential to shine elsewhere.

However, even if Zipteam is introduced to 1,000 users, it is unlikely that all of them will start using it right away. Therefore, we assume that managers will take the lead, and our customers who have already introduced it are using it in that way.

--That's why in the future, it will be necessary for managers to have the authority to make personnel decisions, not just a few people in a company. Is there anything else you would like to say to users from a developer's perspective?

Yoshikawa: For optimal team composition, not only skills but also cultural fit are important, but Zipteam does not manage personalities for the purpose of success. If we manage individuals by temperament or personality diagnosis, that will be all they see, which is misleading. Also, if we visualize whether someone is extroverted or introverted, most managers would probably give priority to extroverts.

Judging someone to be unable to leave the team because their skills and personalities match would make them unhappy, and getting along with others is a completely different matter from succeeding at work. While leaving some room for valuing communication with each person, I want to make sure the team composition is not oversimplified.

On the other hand, I think there is value in sharing passion that only has positive effects, such as "I actually love XX and I've been working on it for a long time!", so I may implement such a feature in the future.

Regarding Zipteam development, some members of the same team are looking ahead five years or more, but I am conscious of the current milestones and one step ahead. People at the center of projects are often expected to be visionary, but I would like to let readers know that there are people like me.

in conclusion

This time, we learned the importance of visualizing skills from Yoshikawa's unique experiences, who has worked in many different fields. We look forward to the day when we can collaborate with you, who want to clarify the direction of the human resources you need and expand your business. If you would like to know more about Zipteam, which improves team performance and realizes innovation born from tacit knowledge, please visit the official website below.

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