It's hard to find a company bigger than 30 people that doesn't have its HR Department - even if it consists of just 1 person. And the name itself is of secondary meaning: some call it Human Resources, some prefer People Operations, Human Capital, etc. Regardless of name I think that the bigger the company, the less existence of such a Dept makes sense. Why so?The work usually associated to such units is of a wide variety: Performance Mgmt, Talent Mgmt, Recruitment, Compensation & Benefits, Employee Relations, Growth and Organization Development, Employer Branding, .... But nearly all of those areas…
The first post in the series can be found here. Last week I've presented one aspect of complexity of the transactional part of our platform - availability (when trying to book a new appointment). And what is more important, how one modelling trick has significantly reduced coupling & simplified (and distributed) business logic. Today I'll cover another aspect of the same functionality (appointments) - pricing. And again, my goal is to show you how one Eureka moment has corrected the course of our architectural direction for the whole platform (!). Baby stepsInitially our pricing logic was trivial - each service type…
Few months ago I've published a short article about what is a Model Debt & why it matters. Today I'd like to provide you with two nice, crispy examples that illustrate the idea. Both are coming from the Domain I currently work on with my teams - booking appointments in Beauty & Wellness industry. Booking an appointment initially was very straightforward. Apart from knowing what (particular service) you were booking & whom (which stylist) you were booking, the only challenge was to make sure that no-one has booked the same time-slot (of a given stylist). We've achieved it in the…
Imagine that ...... you're at the doctor's because you don't feel well - there's something wrong with your health and you need professional help of a medical expert. You sit in front of him, but before you have any chance to describe your problems the interlocutor opens with lengthy praise of value and importance of ... enema. He claims to be a declared fan, who dry-practices enema in his free time, spends time on exploring new applications of enema out of its "core usage". He calls himself an enema artificer (it's even on his business card). Finally, he asks when was the…
There's no point in re-inventing the wheel. We all walk in the footsteps of industry pioneers & use the legacy of their lessons learned for our advantage. However ... Think for yourselfI hate mindlessly copying "industry standards" & "best practices". Software Engineering varies so heavily & is so contextual that what (IMHO) works best is crafting your own solutions to solve your own specific problems (by MAPPING others' experiences onto your own environment). This involves three critical steps I call: Awareness -> Understanding -> ClarityAwareness is all about asking the proper questions, relentlessly exploring the reality (instead of acting…
There's plenty of hard topics in building software, but if you asked me what's the most challenging one, I'd answer without doubt: scaling (engineering) organizations. Why so? first of all: economies of scale do not work for building software (I've written an article about that few years ago, if you're interested in more details)the role of contextual knowledge is more important than in other industries (people/roles are not so easily replaceable), so learning curve for new people is steeper & adaptation takes them more timeorganizations can grow much faster than the sharpest & most successful people within these…
Last week we've released a new mobile app for our business users (we have a SaaS-enabled Marketplace, so we have apps for those businesses' customers as well). There were no advertisements, no marketing, no previews. We were polishing it quietly, alpha & beta testing it, getting some early feedback in an F&F (friends & family) pilot. And then we've finally released it. Not like we've been super-discreet that we did, we may have hinted it to few people ;P ... so the news spread like fire (our users are not only smart, but also form communities - surprised? there's…
Let's talk about "seniority" - but not in the usual way, in a context of career progression. I'm more interested in speaking about the "seniority" itself, regardless of specialty/path chosen, compensation, labels & position names. It's the kind of discussion that revolves around the following questions: what makes senior "senior"?how to measure/compare "seniority"?does seniority have boundaries? (what is the ceiling, how to recognize it and ... what happens when you reach it?)Answering these questions ain't trivial & every organization does it its way (or pretends the problem doesn't exist ...). I have my ways as well: dimensions,…