Everyone was waiting for this 2021, 2020 has been one of the worst year ever due to the Coronavirus pandemic. We need to start from scratch, both for relationships and professional development.
Due to the COVID-19, I have lost relatives and also some of my relationships with my fellows. From a professional perspective, I’ve travelled less, worked mostly in remote-working and I’ve invested in making our daily work in our company smarter. Anyways, we’re speaking about two sides of the same coin: trouble Vs opportunity.
For tech companies, the crisis has been a great opportunity. The disease has triggered (forced to be honest) a set of unstoppable changes. This is true also for Countries’ governments, school, services in general. At the same time, many small businesses and craftsmen stopped working due to lack of consumers. The world is changed and is going to change more and more. The change is killing someone and is testing severely the resilience of the others.
Luckily, our company is still alive and we are growing. I’ve learned many lessons in terms of recruitment, team management, tech stuff, project management. I’ve started to change my mind about multi-tasking and I’ve switched from many things at “the same time” to “the right number of things well managed” (but not only one 😉 I’m not yet able to follow such pattern).
We have dealt with the second big step of scaling out. Our organization is becoming bigger and more structured. The model is still flat, but now each individual is in charge of a single role. As a result, the quality of the product is improved, people are more focused and committed, but on the other hand, the time to market has increased. We have added a new role, which orchestrates the projects into the roadmap, increased the number of POs, created an R&D department, and fully involved Operations guys into the lifecycle (thanks Wikis!). All this stuff has been the game-changer for us.
It’s been so difficult to learn and cover so many topics, but we’ve accomplished our mission. Now we’re ready for the next year with many ideas. We already know that our team will grow more, and we’ll require new approaches. We know that we will deal with teams in different timezones and languages, so what is “smart” now, must become “smarter” tomorrow. Exciting, for sure!
Why am I writing this post? Not just to wrap-up something that happened this year. I would share with you that, starting from February 2021, Engage Labs (this will be our new name) will publish our guys’ blog posts periodically (in Italian language). Our great team will cover many topics, like professional development, lessons learned in the company, technology, and so on. We are a DevOps oriented organization and we would like to let our guys describe themselves.
So, stay tuned😉
Alessandro Alpi's Blog 