How to Get Manager Approval to Buy Stack Overflow for Teams
If you’re a developer or engineering manager, you may not have the purchasing power to buy a new tool or piece of software—but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have an impact on the process. Since you already use Stack Overflow to get answers to your coding problems, it’s likely that you’d naturally use a private version just for you and your team.
Here are a few ways you can get approval from your manager or C-suite to purchase Stack Overflow for Teams.
Show them how many of your teammates already use Stack Overflow to get answers to their coding problems. They probably already know and love Stack Overflow, the public Q&A site. So naturally a private version just for their team would be something of value. Implementation of Teams is easy—it’s set up the same way as the public Q&a site, so there won’t be a huge learning curve like you’d have with other tools.
Think about it this way: Did your boss really like that last project you worked on? Did you use Stack Overflow at all while building it? If so, show how integral Stack Overflow is to your work as a developer both inside and outside the office.
Is your manager worried about turnover? Or has your team recently lost a few developers? When someone leaves the company, their knowledge goes with them, too. Stack Overflow for Teams is a repository of all that historical knowledge. When your best developers leave (not that that would ever happen, right?) make sure their documentation and expertise doesn’t.
Is your team looking to expand in the future? Are there actively open roles on your team? Once you hire new developers, you want to onboard them as efficiently as possible (and get them familiar with the codebase). Using Stack Overflow for Teams makes onboarding as painless as it can be, allowing you to easily and quickly share knowledge between experienced developers and new team members. Unlike existing solutions, Stack Overflow for Teams stays current and always offers the best answer to those pesky, recurring problems.
Connect Stack Overflow for Teams to your company’s goals. What large projects do you have coming up that could get completed faster and more efficiently by using a knowledge-sharing tool?
List out the benefits of the tool—plain and simple. Here are a few to start with.
- You’ll have an unlimited amount of private questions and answers. Better yet, there’s a searchable archive to make it easy to find what you’re looking for.
- Stack Overflow for Teams offers integrations with tools you’re already using like Slack. It also sends notifications to get the right questions in front of the right person.
- There’s a 14-day free trial.
- It eliminates many of the manual processes your team currently follows, which saves everyone time.
If all else fails, rally your fellow teammates who use Stack Overflow to hold a silent demonstration where you only use Stack Overflow for a week to get your work done. Just kidding, of course.
