Should you worry if your web developer falls under a bus?

Unless you are also a fan of baseball, you may not be familiar with the notion of a depth chart. Here’s the November 2019 chart for my team: the San Francisco Giants:

P means starting pitcher (the guy you hope will throw the ball for you most of the game), RP relief pitching, and CL, closing pitcher (often brought in for close games you want to win). C is catcher, 1B, 2B, and 3B are men standing on the bases; SS is the shortstop who ranges between 2nd and 3rd base and LF, CF, and RF are the outfield catchers.

In this chart, we have STARTER, 2ND, 3RD, 4TH and 5TH,  indicating the players on the team who can potentially fill the given roles in order of who you would choose to be on the field on any given day. So you’d rather have Buster Posey on the field than Aramis Garcia, as good as Garcia may well be.

What we can see from this is that the Giants have strength in depth at many positions. If their best CF is not able to play, then four players can fill in. Although if you have Alex Dickerson playing, you know you have a weakness in the centre field position.

You can also see that some players are utility players - like Austin Slater - who aren’t the number one pick for any position but have value because they can fill in at multiple positions. And you can see that Buster Posey, the Giants star catcher, also sometimes fills in at 1st Base, which is traditionally a comfortable fielding position to play; an excellent way to rest your catcher who puts strain on his knees with each  play.

Baseball teams need this because, in a regular season, they will play 162 games over six months, sometimes playing two games on the same day. That’s an incredibly punishing schedule and means you physically can’t play your best guy every day because they either get tired or injured (this happens more often the more you play them).

If you looked at the Giants team, you’d say they had strength in pitching but potentially are weak at Catcher, 2B, and 3B.

All well and good, but what does any of this have to do with running your business?

If you think about how your business works, you can see it as being composed of many roles & responsibilities that different people execute. Some of them will be more important than others (in the same way that the quality of starting pitching tends to have more impact on win rate than a good first baseman); this is where the notion of strength in depth emerges.

In the beginning, there is the founder, and they do everything. Often they are too busy to even explore what their roles & responsibilities are. But they usually know the first couple of hires they need to make, because critical weaknesses are already exposed. The tricky part comes after,  as the organisation grows, to ensure you cover your bases.

There usually comes the point where roles & responsibilities are becoming unclear, and it’s not obvious where you are weakest. A CEO with an extensive marketing background can often fill in for the Marketing Director, but can they do technology? Or sales?

It’s hard work, but worthwhile, to map out the roles & responsibilities of the business (note that this is a higher-resolution than titles) and see who can fill in each position, and what order you would put them in. You might find that you have 3-4 people who could update your social media profiles but nobody who can solve a problem with an AWS site if your main tech guy is out of the office / under a bus.

The value of a depth-chart is that you can get strategic about roles you need to fill. For example, when hiring and presented with two excellent candidates, one of whom can play utility and fill a weakness, it becomes more straightforward to decide who to hire.

Why don’t you try mapping out a depth chart for your business, see what it tells you, and what decisions it provokes?