IT hiring is one of the most challenging and very important part for product teams. There is no perfect template for an ideal process and it´s about finding the best fit.
When introducing business and positions to potential colleagues, be sure they understand who you are. That´s the main reason why we created this interview introduction as an important and useful part of communication with IT talents.
About your Product team – Can you introduce more about the team structure and methodologies used?
We are a small team. Just one PM and 3 developers – 1 frontender, 1 backender and one full-stack developer with data fetish 😀 We embraced daily scrums/standups through Hangouts that help us stay on target and in touch with each other since we are all working remotely. We used to do two-week sprints with biweekly releases in the past but in the last month or so the deadlines became too tight and priorities too hazy, so we switched to a more kanban-like style of work and we tried to really let go of all the unnecessary administrative work to speed up the development as much as possible. Once this crunch-like time ends in 2-3 months, we will go back to two-week sprints.
What is the tech stack currently used? Do you have examples of technologies the team has learned in the past 6 months?
We are running Typescript on the frontend, Node.js on the backend and Admin is written in Ruby. We use RabbitMQ queues, Auth0 for authorization, Sendgrid for emails and we host our apps on Heroku. Our tech stack is diverse and we want to make it more homogeneous eventually. Regarding the new technologies that we are dabbling in, the “talk of the day” in our dev team is Elasticsearch. We haven’t learned it yet, but we are working on it 😉
How do you measure work performance success within the team?
Since we are a very small team, we don’t really “measure” work performance success. It’s also like that because we need to work really closely together and we depend on each other a lot more than more numerous teams/departments. Once somebody doesn’t do his job or if is under-performing, we all know very quickly. Mostly because it’s blocking our own work.
What are the challenges your team faces regularly, what is the Product team proud about?
The number one challenge that we face each and every time we wake up and go to work is not enough hours in a day. Our IT capacity is very limited and we need to be really picky about what is going to be implemented and how. I don’t know what our devs are proud about, but I am most proud of them and the professional growth they showed. And that ties to our plans for the future. Once we stabilize, we hope to have time to dive into refactoring the code and taking care of our tech debt – and our devs are really looking forward to it too.
