From the idea to the product: The genesis of Skwill

At TIMETOACT Österreich, we strongly believe in the benefits of continuous learning. This has not only led to us running an Innovation Incubator but also to developing products that we enjoy using ourselves and are happy to share with other people as well!

One of these tools derived from an Innovation Incubator is Skwill. Since we love to use it internally, we didn't want to withhold it from you people out there. Today, we want to share with you the genesis of Skwill from an internal Learning & Sharing Project to a full grown product.

The Ideation Phase

For this Innovation Incubator Project, we started as a team of three people with lots of ideas and the will to develop something really cool that provides value to us as a team.
So where did this idea of developing a tool based on the so-called “skill-will matrix” came from? Initially, the idea was pitched by one of our Project Managers, who heard about this method from one of their clients in the HR sector. The advantage of this matrix is easy to explain: List your skills and interests in the matrix and visualize where you are good and what you want to do keep doing, but also make visible where you want to get better versus which activities you would want to avoid based on your interests.

It didn’t take long until we had a long list full of ideas on how we could further use this matrix. So the next phase was all about which of these features provide the most value and can be implemented within our given timeframe of 1 day per week for 5 weeks? We’ll call that one “the focus phase”.

The Focus Phase

Having lots of ideas is fun and easy compared to the process of deciding what you actually want and should implement. So how did we decide which features we want to work on?

The individual Skill Will Matrix

It goes without saying that the first feature we wanted to provide was what we now call the “individual skill-will matrix”. It helps not only reflecting upon your own skills and interests, but it also helps to set a focus on your own personal development and where you want to know more and improve. Once we collected this data within our company, what else can we do with it? Can we combine and display these matrices in other contexts to make new valuable information visible? Spoiler: Sure we can!

The combined Skill Will Matrix

Ever wondered what your colleagues you rarely work on projects together actually do and what their interests are? And wouldn’t it be cool to visualize your matrix combined with others to see what skills your team can bring to the table? The feature we agreed on implementing was born: The combined skill will matrix lets you display different matrices collectively in a single one to visualize all your combined synergies.

The Teams Skill Will Matrix

Cool feature, but if I wanted to view the combined Matrix of established teams, wouldn’t there be an easier way? Yay — the third feature was born! The Teams Skill Matrix displays the combined matrices of teams so it’s even more convenient to get an overview of the skills of all the teams in your company.

The New Project Feature

Having a tool that helps you to find the colleagues with the right set of skills for a new project would come in handy, wouldn’t it? We thought so too, which is why we integrated the “new project” feature. Based on the skills needed for your project, the application offers you a list of people that fit your needs.

What other ideas did we have in mind?

Probably the most interesting idea one of our developers came up with was the idea to visualize the skill/will matrix using a timeline. This way, one could easily see how the skills and wills have changed over time.

So what’s next?

We will keep using Skwill for our internal needs such as regular appraisals, onboarding new team members, reflecting upon our own skills and wills and finding new great teams for projects to come! But of course, we will be adding features and functionality to make this application even more useful and valuable to users. If this is something you’re interested in exploring with us, have a look at softwarepark.cc/introduce/skwill.

Overall, it was a pleasure bringing this idea — which started as a simple internal learning & sharing project — to life and to see how it evolved and became mature so it can be shared with the world. So hopefully, Skwill will thrill you as much as it thrills us!