Startup culture during last years have come from hype to mainstream. Business need for innovations and digital transformation added extra fuel to the mindset change. Even tech moguls like Oracle or Microsoft are adopting this innovative mindset. This change is closely related to an adoption of agile delivery methodology, since demand is to create new ideas, evaluate them quickly (via MVPs for instance) and then, either scale or fail-fast. Several unicorns have already proven the concept viable. However, the biggest challenge, as I’ve been seeing across the industry is to manage “scaling” phase and to deliver production-ready product.
Alert — excuses approaching
In my 15 years experience in development, team leadership and management of multiple product streams I’ve encountered various development processes and approaches. First real “leap” was adoption of iterative way of delivery (you can see this across multiple agile methodologies but also in for instance PRINCE2 with its stage controlling etc.). But as any other methodology in past, iterative ones are not prone to bigotry and bureaucracy as well. If scrum doesn’t work, we come up with Spotify model hoping for miraculous change, with new names for the same roles, new set of meetings and new set of “games”, but still facing the same issues of lacking ownership and accountability. If our project tracking software is not satisfying (because backlog is crap), we move to another one hoping, that new tool would save us rather than going deeper and refine our specs. And so on, and so on…
Same “thing” — different product
Honestly, we faced the same problems in localhost.company. The biggest challenge has been the simplest one — to deliver product for our customer in time, in quality and in budget (you know, what I’m talking about 🙂 ). Because at the end of the day, every customer needs production ready software, maintainable, scalable and usable. After trying plethora of approaches (Scrum, Kanban, Scrumban, Lean) we realised, that we’ve been missing something. So we step back a little and look on agile manifesto again, but this time as an “interface” to implement, rather than implementation. This approach brought us more “mental space” for manoeuvring and ability to incorporate principles from various sources like Management 3.0 and my favourite Gyshido (Get your s**t done — https://www.gyshido.com).
One goal to rule them all
Embracing rule to “inspect and adapt” completely, boosting people motivation and having absolute focus on finishing your stuff, we call our approach “zero-to-one” (yes, similarity with Peter Thiel is not coincidence). In essence we create delivery “framework” per project, because every project is specific — there is specific set of people in the dev team, specific timeframe, specific technologies, specific product and every customer is specific too. So all the aspects of such tailored delivery approach like people management, project governance, customer expectation management etc. is primarily dedicated to one ultimate goal — to deliver!
Vladislav Jevcak / Chief Technology Officer
We would like to introduce you to our new interview format, which will be gradually added to our blog. As the first in line, we interviewed our Croatian colleague Mario Plantosar, who is a react native developer. He told us what he does in his free time, how he hacked a computer at his elementary school, and when is the best time to visit Zagreb.
Welcome to this interview where we dive into the world of product owners in the software development industry with our colleague Karol. According to him, being a product owner is an exciting and dynamic role that includes a wide range of responsibilities. We will find out what he learned in the Romanian city Cluj and also, what vacation destination he recommends. So, let’s get into it and explore what it’s like to be a product owner in this rapidly changing and innovative field! :)
Data science has become a powerful field that combines statistical analysis, machine learning, and domain knowledge to extract valuable insights from complex datasets. By leveraging data collection, cleaning, exploration, modeling, and visualization techniques, businesses can uncover patterns and correlations that drive innovation and decision-making. Let’s explore the exciting world of data science and its transformative impact across various industries.
Some people bike or watch series in their free time. Our colleague Michal Géci, however, used that time to create his own arcade game called Ulrich. It’s about a vampire who one day receives a strange letter. After long nights of story development, drawing, programming, and composing music, he revealed more to us :)
Our client is one of the biggest suppliers of spare parts for transport vehicles and buses in Slovakia and the only producer of buses in our country. With more than 90k different kinds of commodities in its warehouses and growing operations every year, the point where all the stock movements in, between and out of the warehouses became particularly challenging was reached. It has had certain implications for controlling, reporting processes and in overall transparency of financial and data flows in company.
Need Code Expertise?
Contact us
