“Being humble doesn’t mean you’re not assertive.” Veselin Pavlov, Sr. Engineering Manager at Dreamix, shared his experience on our culture of leadership in IT, team structure and the importance of industry domain knowledge. Check out this episode of Leaders to Leaders and watch the video on Youtube!
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Our culture
When we join an existing project, we don’t just go in and start shooting off criticisms and suggestions. Our main idea is to join and see the way people work. Because oftentimes, there might be business or technical restrictions. For example, we may need a test environment, but the testing tool is too costly. And you need to make a decision: is there some other way we can validate the features without having a testing environment for each one?
The ideas that we give are valued. Our partners don’t want people to just show up, write some code, and go. They want people who are involved in the project , contribute to the whole idea and think of the bigger picture, not just tunnel vision on one specific task.Â
This is something we all do and our partners appreciate it. In our culture, everyone is responsible for the product or project and everyone openly shares their ideas.
Humbleness, leadership in IT and entrepreneurship
Being humble doesn’t mean you’re not assertive.
At the end of the day, we strive to achieve a goal. That is, to launch the product and to produce value for the customers and the users. And if you see that something is hurting the project and the product, you need to speak up and bring attention to it. Many of our teammates have this entrepreneurial mindset. They are very happy to help with defining the requirements, digging deeper in the business logic and customer needs. That’s what true leadership in IT is.
How we structure our team
We build teams depending on what’s needed. If we need to implement UI functions using React or Angular, for example, we’d add people with that know-how. And if we need to contribute to the backend, we’d also include a senior backend person. Usually, we also have a DevOps expert helping set up continuous integration and deployment pipelines.Â
We also have QAs in the teams that establish the testing strategy, do manual testing in the beginning and decide on what automation tests can be done. We have local product owners that. talk to stakeholders to get their vision and then serve as a bridge with the developers.
The importance of industry domain knowledge for leadership in IT
Domain knowledge in the specific industry has a tremendous impact on the delivery of the team.
When I first started working on transportation-related projects, there was a lot to learn. Things like EDI messages or fact formats, specifically used in transportation systems, take a week or more of pure research.
Then you need to research libraries that can map your classes and other systems’ data. You also need to know how to design the domain, what objects to use in your code and how to sort them in the database. If you start off with the wrong design, by the time you realize your performance is lacking, it might be too late.
Since we’ve already tackled such issues in the past, we can predict them in advance. We have also done integrations with customs systems such as UK customs. There is a main system that handles the digital customs declarations and when you’ve done it already, you’ll cut the time needed in half.
If your company needs IT experts with field expertise and leadership in IT, like Veselin, don’t hesitate to reach us.
