At Thoughtbot, we prioritize consistent rotations of team members to ensure that both our clients and ourselves benefit from a well-rounded and experienced development ecosystem. By rotating our consultants, we aim to foster fresh perspectives, uncover problems that may have been overlooked, and drive continuous improvement in our clients’ products and processes.
The first reason for rotating our consultants is to improve the quality and efficiency of our services. When a consultant is familiar with a particular technology stack, architecture, or industry, they can provide valuable insights and solutions that may not be apparent when working with a new team member. This can lead to simpler and more effective problem-solving, faster iteration cycles, and a more streamlined development process. Additionally, rotating consultants allows us to offer clients a broader range of expertise and experience, which can help them leverage the best practices, tools, and techniques from different industries and technologies.
The second reason for rotating our consultants is to maintain the expertise and skillset of our team. When a consultant has worked on multiple projects and collaborated with various teams, they have gained a wealth of experience and knowledge that can be applied to new projects. This diversity of skills and perspectives can help our team adapt to changing requirements, identify new opportunities, and continuously enhance our product’s functionality and user experience. By rotating our
At thoughtbot, we aim to have consistent rotations of team members.
We’ve found that working on more projects helps provide opportunities for growth, but we also understand how clients may not find replacing one of their trusted thoughtbot consultants the most appealing idea.
Rotations are good for both our clients and us. Here’s why:
Fresh Eyes Equals Better Solutions
When you work on the same codebase for months, your team gets used to how things are and may eventually overlook problems hiding in plain sight.
Bringing in a new consultant with a clean slate can feel uncomfortable at first: they may question the status quo of the project, challenge assumptions, and notice bad practices that have blended into your engineering culture. Even though this might sting initially, it ultimately strengthens your codebase, processes, and team.
This “fresh eyes” effect often uncovers:
- Simpler ways to solve persistent issues.
- Opportunities to improve performance or maintainability.
- User experience hiccups that can be smoothed out.
- New patterns and techniques that improve developer experience.
For clients, this means that you are not only working with great consultants, but also you are getting the benefit of a full project audit from an experienced developer who is seeing your product for the first time.
Variety builds expertise
At a consultancy like thoughtbot, consultants usually don’t work on one product for years at a time. We rotate between different clients, industries, and even tech stacks.
Why we do it? Because variety helps building expertise.
A consultant that has been exposed to different architectures, solved different problems with various stacks, and navigated teams of different sizes has a wider set of tools compared to someone who has only worked in one environment for a long time.
The combination of experiences gained through exposure to diverse ideas benefits your entire team and not only the person currently working on the code.
Sharpen Onboarding and Offboarding Skills
It’s not a bug, it’s a feature.
Planned rotations force us and your team to be very good at starting and finishing well.
When a new consultant joins your project, they need to get up to speed quickl by understanding the codebase, the purpose of the product, and the team dynamics. Over time, our consultants become experts at onboarding themselves efficiently.
When a consultant leaves your project, they need to ensure the upcoming person has everything they need to succeed. This usually means writing documentation and hand-off notes and working together for some time with the consultant taking their place. Even thought we work on this from day one, the moment when a new developer joins your team demands us to not forget about paying attention to the documentation.
This process benefits not only the incoming consultant but also makes it easier for anyone, including your internal team, to onboard quickly, while reducing the workload on current team members.
What got you here won’t get you there
Yes, rotations bring change and a common concern is the inevitable temporary productivity loss that comes during the transition period. We see this as the kind of change that makes your product stronger in the long-term and this temporary drop in productivity pays off when you consider the advantages that bringing new people to the team provides:
- Fresh eyes help us spot better solutions.
- Variety sharpens our skills.
- The constant practice of onboarding and offboarding ensures your project is well-documented, resilient, and ready for the future.
It’s also worth mentioning that the average tenure for tech companies is around two years and rotations help you stay on top of the upcoming changes in your team that are not under your control.
