CTOcast # 0: Ruslan Sinitsky (Jelastic)
Introducing the zero-issue podcast about technologies, processes, infrastructure, and people in IT companies. Today CTOcast is visited by Ruslan Sinitsky, CTO and co-founder of Jelastic.
Listen to the podcast
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Ruslan Sinitsky was born in 1978. Lives and works in Zhytomyr, Ukraine. Since childhood, he was fond of programming, he graduated from the Zhytomyr Military Institute of Radio Electronics with a degree in Special Monitoring Equipment. In 2001–2008 worked in the National Space Agency of Ukraine, where he was engaged in the development of software for monitoring earthquakes on the surface of the Earth. In 2008-2011 - Senior UI Architect in iQueLab. He also worked as a freelancer in various outsourcing companies.
A few words about Jelastic :
In 2008, at Habré, Ruslan Sinitsky met Konstantin Alexandrov (a programmer from Voronezh), with whom he came up with the idea of ​​a tool for Java developers that would simplify the process of developing applications and scaling them. Without a personal meeting in 2 years, Ruslan and Konstantin created a prototype.
In 2010, the company Hivext Technologies, Inc. was founded, which became the father of Jelastic. Approximately at the same time, Alexey Skutin joined the team, who started looking for potential investors and promoting Jelastic on the market. In December 2010, investments in the sowing round were received from the Runa Capital fund, which allowed everyone to gather in one city - Zhytomyr and recruit a development team.
In 2012, the next investment round was held, in which Almaz Capital Partners participated. In the same year, Jelastic was awarded the Duke's Choice Technology Award - the most prestigious award in the Java world.
In September 2013, Maxfield Capital joined the investing team, and John Derrick replaced Mr. Ruslan as CEO.
At the moment, the company has about 80 thousand users worldwide - in the USA, Europe, Asia and 24 partners - a hosting provider. Jelastic positions itself as the only Platform-as-Infrastructure solution in the world.
Listen to the podcast
Pavel Pavlov: Today the theme of Platform-as-Infrastructure has been touched on. I would like to know in more detail about the meaning of your company in this term?
Ruslan Sinitsky: The term is really new, it appeared just recently. We, frankly, created it. Initially, we made a kind of platform - Platform-as-a-Service, with which we positioned our company and which allowed us to simplify the life of developers. But the business model of our product was different from similar solutions, for example, Heroku and other similar products. Our main difference was that we did not put our software on Amazon, but in the data centers of our partners. Accordingly, we had to solve the problems of Infrastructure-as-a-Service. It so happened that at first they themselves did not understand this, in one product we solved two problems: Platform-as-a-Service and Infrastructure-as-a-Service. Therefore, our product is more complex and complex than our competitors.
Out of the box you get a full range of - Platform-as-a-Service and Infrastructure-as-a-Service. We have two administration panels: one for developers, the other for cluster administrators. And for our platform it is not necessary to have some kind of lower layer, it is enough to provide bare iron and we can put a platform on top of it and solve the tasks that our competitors solve, but based on Amazon.
Therefore, in a nutshell, Platform-as-Infrastructure is a hybrid of Platform-as-a-Service and Infrastructure-as-a-Service.
Alexander Astapenko: This is very well reflected in the design of your website, where two concepts merge and form Platform-as-Infrastructure.
Ruslan Sinitsky: Yes, in fact, we have removed some inefficiency. Our product is designed to eliminate inefficiency: constant repetition of the same actions by administrators, two layers. People are not soared about Infrastructure-as-a-Service or Platform-as-a-Service, they need a solution to specific problems. And our product simplifies complicated things.
Alexander Astapenko: The direct customers and those who, in fact, pay for the product, are B2B companies, that is, some kind of middle layer, and not end users who will work with Jelastic. This, for example, hosting providers. So? A few words about who your customers are?
Ruslan Sinitsky: You correctly noted that there are several levels of clients. If we talk about customers who pay us money directly, today they are hosters and companies that want to put Jelastic on their hardware. These can be banks, outsourcing companies, integrators, companies providing telecommunication services, that is, the B2B sector. These people, the same hosters, sell Jelastic to developers or SMB. If we talk about integrators and outsourcing companies, they don’t sell it to anyone, but solve their problems within the company, simplify development processes.
Alexander Astapenko: Do I understand correctly that product promotion goes in two directions: for end users who will work with the results, that is, the Jelastic product itself, and those who will install Jelastic on their servers?
Ruslan Sinitsky: Initially, we created a product for business customers, for hosters, but in principle we always marketed it for end users. That is, our marketing strategy has always been for the most part aimed at end users. We initially created the Jelastic brand, explained why Jelastic is good, how it simplifies development, saves time and resources. Thus, we attracted the ultimate developers, SMB to our site and explained to them. We had a lot of traffic, then this traffic was already distributed among our partners. Naturally, we also did marketing in the hosting industry, went to conferences, explained why hosters need to establish a platform, how they can open a new branch of business. But the main resources, about 80%, were spent on creating a brand, recognizability of Jelastic among developers, those people who will directly use this product to solve their problems. At the moment we are starting to expand our marketing strategy and use more resources to promote our product in B2B, because now we need to communicate with enterprise clients, explain why they need Jelastic, how it can simplify life. There is a need to communicate with outsourcing companies, that is, this is another additional client.
Pavel Pavlov: This is the context of interest in the product, the platform, and how did you build trust in what you are doing at the beginning of the development of the company and when working with large corporate clients?
Ruslan Sinitsky: Usually people are suspicious of new products, but there are always those who are willing to try to take a chance. These are mainly people who are looking for new markets, who understand that by connecting some kind of innovation to their business in time, you can win a good market segment. In our case, contacts with Parallels turned out to be important. They introduced us to hosters, their familiar people. And, roughly speaking, certain people vouch for their name. For example, Sergey Belousov represented us to his business acquaintances in the hosting industry and people, knowing Sergey and trusting him, began to listen to us at least. This does not mean that they will do what Sergey told them with their eyes closed. This means that at least they welcomed us and listened to us. I traveled at the initial stage for different hosting companies. And most of them listened and said, “Well, come back later.” Nevertheless, it was possible to hook on one hoster, from which it all started. This is Host Europe - the third hoster in Germany. In principle, the first transaction was based on personal relationships. After that, we launched a beta, started publishing about Jelastic, comparing ourselves with competitors, attracting an audience. Accordingly, traffic went. The hoster who trusted us saw that the end-user had an interest, and we started using it as a user case for other potential partners, and so began to attract them. Then a hoster appeared in America. And when it was already two, the third is much easier to connect. When there was three - the fourth, fifth and twentieth went on the thumb track. The first deals were based on more personal relationships.
The second point that needs to be emphasized in the development of Jelastic is that our product was based on a technical solution that our competitors did not have. They had a big problem with this - compatibility with standard applications. With Jelastic, you can plug in any standard application and Jelastic will simplify its scaling. In many cases, he can do it automatically. Almost always, you do not need to rewrite anything, because you can write to the file system, load your favorite libraries, change configuration files, if you think that Jelastic does not optimally provide the default settings. We try not to limit the end users in the use of their accumulated experience, the reuse of their libraries, so to say. This technical solution was very popular with the end consumers and we began to grow rapidly.
Pavel Pavlov: You managed to reach a certain compromise between the universality of the platform, which would be suitable for many groups of users, and the space for flexibility and fine-tuning.
Ruslan Sinitsky: Yes, I think we managed to find a balance.
Pavel Pavlov: How long did it come to this?
Ruslan Sinitsky: We went to this at the level of intuition. I will not say that we are fully aware of. Intuitively. Even our deal with Runa Capital, which, in fact, turned out by chance. But we already knew that we would be okay, we would make a deal with Runa Capital and get access to Parallels, one of the leaders in the field of virtualization. Having access to these technologies and talking to the tech guys inside this company, we appreciated how much potential this company has with a very good virtualization product. And we made it the basis. Then it turned out that the product has an advantage that other Platform-as-a-Service does not have - vertical scaling, the ability to automatically scale applications, complete isolation of resources, that is, each application can be allocated isolated resources and can be allowed to write files to the file system, the ability to migrate the application between the iron servers without downtime. That is, in the process we began to find our virtues. I will not say that it was originally a clear plan. Initially, it was planned to avoid any requirements for changes in the user application.
When we created the first version of our Hivext product, we gathered 5,000 users, and this Hivext was similar to the Google App Engine - Backend-as-a-Serivce. The disadvantage of this approach is that users cannot enclose a standard application, they cannot use the experience gained - they have to write an application again. Accordingly, for a small startup, this is a road to nowhere. Large companies will not go there, only small startups, which in principle are not able to pay money at the initial stage. Having learned from this, we decided to make the main disadvantage in the next version of our platform. We said that we will make a platform that does not require rewriting your code.
We are constantly learning, creating something, testing it on the market, receiving feedback and improving our product. And even our recent changes in the direction of Platform-as-Infrastructure happened thanks to the experience accumulated over the entire period of our work.
Alexander Astapenko: Very similar to the Lean-approach.
Ruslan Sinitsky: Yes, it almost looks like. Honestly, I did not read it initially, but then, when the time passed and I found a book, I read it and understood that we are very close to it.
Alexander Astapenko: But when you come to hosters or some corporate clients, not everyone has Parallels products with which you need to integrate. Each of them has its own environment. I understand that you encounter every time a new separate case that needs to be solved - how to integrate with this or that partner? Can you tell us a little about it?
Ruslan Sinitsky: This was especially true for the first versions of Jelastic. We did not understand what other requirements are needed for iron. Up to the end did not understand where the space will be for maneuver. If we talk about virtualization, we also did not understand whether it is possible to launch our product in other virtualization layers, based on the same Amazon or Rackspace. Indeed, the billing system for each partner is often samopisnaya, some use some standard solutions, but there are a certain number of these solutions. Over time, we improved our product and currently received a boxed solution. We come to the hoster and say: “To run Jelastic, you need iron with these requirements ...”. Virtualization, non-virtualization - it does not interest him, he doesn’t touch the Parallels virtualization system at all. If we talk about billing, we have created our own internal virtual billing, all processes take place inside Jelastic and now we integrate at the API level, telling any hosting billing system that at the end of the month you need to withdraw so much money from the user. How they shoot is their questions.
The further the product develops, the more versatile it becomes, the easier it is to maintain, more documentation, user cases, less initial resource requirements for running Jelastic appear.
Alexander Astapenko: And how is the process going on? Who does the integration? Specialists from the host or someone on your part? And as far as the process is controlled by the hoster? How much do they want to control it?
Ruslan Sinitsky: The first integrations were almost blind. When we went through this several times, we realized that the processes are repeated. Accordingly, a master plan was created. This is not only installing software, but also fine tuning, preparing marketing materials, preparing the site, customizing letter templates that are sent to users, localizing. Therefore, the integration is painted on clear steps on each side: on the side of Jelastic or hoster. For the integration of Jelastic stand out two people. This is the account manager who leads the project (mostly non-technical specialist). This is a person who speaks good English and has good communication skills. And the second person is a techie who directly performs the technical work: Jelastic installation, configuration, analysis, if something went wrong. There are actions that must be performed on the side of the hoster. This list is issued to the host and the account manager runs with the project manager on the host side for each item, explains what needs to be done, leads the host on the project. Today, this is a fully predictable process and we can roughly estimate how long it will take to integrate with a particular hoster, plan our own resources.
Alexander Astapenko: It can be seen that the process has already been prepared over the years. I understand that in the beginning it was not at all like that. You went through your own experience. Right?
Ruslan Sinitsky: It was dreadful initially, to be honest. We are lucky that we have found a person who, when there is chaos, throws him into this chaos and there immediately becomes order. Such a person is necessary for the company.
Alexander Astapenko: In Russia, at the end of the 90s, such a person was thrown at the government of the country, we heard about it.
Ruslan Sinitsky: Well, yes)
Alexander Astapenko: I want to return now to the product itself, which also developed, as well as the integration process. Who deals with product related issues in a company? How a decision is made will one or another feature enter the product, evaluate its prospects, what life cycle it goes through. As you said, you are launching something, testing it on the market, getting feedback, changing, and so on in this cycle. Who does this and what does the process look like?
Ruslan Sinitsky: When there were 5--7 people, this question was solved easier, fewer people and big things were more obvious. When people become more and more work begins to appear, then everything becomes more complicated. Therefore, it is necessary to implement certain processes. We invited specialists who came to our team and set up processes. This concerned the process of determining the priority of a particular functional. Today we use Agile, we use backlog.
There are many sources of information, from where we draw directions for the potential development of our product. First of all, these are end users. We always hear the final developers: what is convenient, what is uncomfortable, what they like, what they don’t like, what restrictions there are. We periodically analyze the support channel. Caliper engineers send a report in one direction or another every week, which functions were the most requested. We hear our partner hosts, who also have certain requests for cluster management, or they fail to attract an additional segment of users, because they cannot provide this or that function. We have an understanding of where we want to develop our product. We have needs internal, refactoring modules. Someone in the team may not like how this or that solution is designed architecturally and it has the best offer. There is a need for operations, an installation team, they want to reduce the time spent on it. Directions are becoming more and more.
At the moment, I communicate with each lead of directions (on support, on communication with hosters, etc.) and we are collecting feedback, a kind of flat list. In it we hold a vote, that is, each person in the direction determines the most priority functionality. This is then analyzed and I make up the final roadmap for release. We once again discuss this roadmap with key employees and come to the fact that everyone understands why these features are the most critical in the current release.
Alexander Astapenko: So you can say that you are the person who forms the Jelastic product?
Ruslan Sinitsky: You can say this, but I want to emphasize that the product is formed by the whole team. It's just that I am the person who collects information from different sources, listens to the arguments of different parties why this is important, hear the pain of different people and try to set priorities correctly. To explain to some people why, for example, the feature proposed by another department is more important than the one offered by them. Then the team will understand where the product develops, there will be no internal conflicts, wars. It is very important. That is, I am a kind of mediator at the current stage.
Alexander Astapenko: Well, the features have gathered, lined up priorities, hit the release and the market. How do you decide the feature you need and it remains or remove it from the product? Or you do not remove those features that go there?
Ruslan Sinitsky: We are trying to make an MVP (Minimum viable product) - something that is easy to do in one squat, which is basically complete and solves a particular problem. We try to give it to the end users and look at their reaction, that is, we collect feedback. , , . - , . . , . -, - , , . , . , . , Ruby , . Ruby. 100% , , . : , 80%, 90% . , 95% ?
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Continuation of the text version of the podcast - in the coming days.
Listen to the podcast
')
Ruslan Sinitsky was born in 1978. Lives and works in Zhytomyr, Ukraine. Since childhood, he was fond of programming, he graduated from the Zhytomyr Military Institute of Radio Electronics with a degree in Special Monitoring Equipment. In 2001–2008 worked in the National Space Agency of Ukraine, where he was engaged in the development of software for monitoring earthquakes on the surface of the Earth. In 2008-2011 - Senior UI Architect in iQueLab. He also worked as a freelancer in various outsourcing companies.
A few words about Jelastic :
In 2008, at Habré, Ruslan Sinitsky met Konstantin Alexandrov (a programmer from Voronezh), with whom he came up with the idea of ​​a tool for Java developers that would simplify the process of developing applications and scaling them. Without a personal meeting in 2 years, Ruslan and Konstantin created a prototype.
In 2010, the company Hivext Technologies, Inc. was founded, which became the father of Jelastic. Approximately at the same time, Alexey Skutin joined the team, who started looking for potential investors and promoting Jelastic on the market. In December 2010, investments in the sowing round were received from the Runa Capital fund, which allowed everyone to gather in one city - Zhytomyr and recruit a development team.
In 2012, the next investment round was held, in which Almaz Capital Partners participated. In the same year, Jelastic was awarded the Duke's Choice Technology Award - the most prestigious award in the Java world.
In September 2013, Maxfield Capital joined the investing team, and John Derrick replaced Mr. Ruslan as CEO.
At the moment, the company has about 80 thousand users worldwide - in the USA, Europe, Asia and 24 partners - a hosting provider. Jelastic positions itself as the only Platform-as-Infrastructure solution in the world.
Listen to the podcast
Text version of the podcast (1st part)
Pavel Pavlov: Today the theme of Platform-as-Infrastructure has been touched on. I would like to know in more detail about the meaning of your company in this term?
Ruslan Sinitsky: The term is really new, it appeared just recently. We, frankly, created it. Initially, we made a kind of platform - Platform-as-a-Service, with which we positioned our company and which allowed us to simplify the life of developers. But the business model of our product was different from similar solutions, for example, Heroku and other similar products. Our main difference was that we did not put our software on Amazon, but in the data centers of our partners. Accordingly, we had to solve the problems of Infrastructure-as-a-Service. It so happened that at first they themselves did not understand this, in one product we solved two problems: Platform-as-a-Service and Infrastructure-as-a-Service. Therefore, our product is more complex and complex than our competitors.
Out of the box you get a full range of - Platform-as-a-Service and Infrastructure-as-a-Service. We have two administration panels: one for developers, the other for cluster administrators. And for our platform it is not necessary to have some kind of lower layer, it is enough to provide bare iron and we can put a platform on top of it and solve the tasks that our competitors solve, but based on Amazon.
Therefore, in a nutshell, Platform-as-Infrastructure is a hybrid of Platform-as-a-Service and Infrastructure-as-a-Service.
Alexander Astapenko: This is very well reflected in the design of your website, where two concepts merge and form Platform-as-Infrastructure.
Ruslan Sinitsky: Yes, in fact, we have removed some inefficiency. Our product is designed to eliminate inefficiency: constant repetition of the same actions by administrators, two layers. People are not soared about Infrastructure-as-a-Service or Platform-as-a-Service, they need a solution to specific problems. And our product simplifies complicated things.
Alexander Astapenko: The direct customers and those who, in fact, pay for the product, are B2B companies, that is, some kind of middle layer, and not end users who will work with Jelastic. This, for example, hosting providers. So? A few words about who your customers are?
Ruslan Sinitsky: You correctly noted that there are several levels of clients. If we talk about customers who pay us money directly, today they are hosters and companies that want to put Jelastic on their hardware. These can be banks, outsourcing companies, integrators, companies providing telecommunication services, that is, the B2B sector. These people, the same hosters, sell Jelastic to developers or SMB. If we talk about integrators and outsourcing companies, they don’t sell it to anyone, but solve their problems within the company, simplify development processes.
Alexander Astapenko: Do I understand correctly that product promotion goes in two directions: for end users who will work with the results, that is, the Jelastic product itself, and those who will install Jelastic on their servers?
Ruslan Sinitsky: Initially, we created a product for business customers, for hosters, but in principle we always marketed it for end users. That is, our marketing strategy has always been for the most part aimed at end users. We initially created the Jelastic brand, explained why Jelastic is good, how it simplifies development, saves time and resources. Thus, we attracted the ultimate developers, SMB to our site and explained to them. We had a lot of traffic, then this traffic was already distributed among our partners. Naturally, we also did marketing in the hosting industry, went to conferences, explained why hosters need to establish a platform, how they can open a new branch of business. But the main resources, about 80%, were spent on creating a brand, recognizability of Jelastic among developers, those people who will directly use this product to solve their problems. At the moment we are starting to expand our marketing strategy and use more resources to promote our product in B2B, because now we need to communicate with enterprise clients, explain why they need Jelastic, how it can simplify life. There is a need to communicate with outsourcing companies, that is, this is another additional client.
Pavel Pavlov: This is the context of interest in the product, the platform, and how did you build trust in what you are doing at the beginning of the development of the company and when working with large corporate clients?
Ruslan Sinitsky: Usually people are suspicious of new products, but there are always those who are willing to try to take a chance. These are mainly people who are looking for new markets, who understand that by connecting some kind of innovation to their business in time, you can win a good market segment. In our case, contacts with Parallels turned out to be important. They introduced us to hosters, their familiar people. And, roughly speaking, certain people vouch for their name. For example, Sergey Belousov represented us to his business acquaintances in the hosting industry and people, knowing Sergey and trusting him, began to listen to us at least. This does not mean that they will do what Sergey told them with their eyes closed. This means that at least they welcomed us and listened to us. I traveled at the initial stage for different hosting companies. And most of them listened and said, “Well, come back later.” Nevertheless, it was possible to hook on one hoster, from which it all started. This is Host Europe - the third hoster in Germany. In principle, the first transaction was based on personal relationships. After that, we launched a beta, started publishing about Jelastic, comparing ourselves with competitors, attracting an audience. Accordingly, traffic went. The hoster who trusted us saw that the end-user had an interest, and we started using it as a user case for other potential partners, and so began to attract them. Then a hoster appeared in America. And when it was already two, the third is much easier to connect. When there was three - the fourth, fifth and twentieth went on the thumb track. The first deals were based on more personal relationships.
The second point that needs to be emphasized in the development of Jelastic is that our product was based on a technical solution that our competitors did not have. They had a big problem with this - compatibility with standard applications. With Jelastic, you can plug in any standard application and Jelastic will simplify its scaling. In many cases, he can do it automatically. Almost always, you do not need to rewrite anything, because you can write to the file system, load your favorite libraries, change configuration files, if you think that Jelastic does not optimally provide the default settings. We try not to limit the end users in the use of their accumulated experience, the reuse of their libraries, so to say. This technical solution was very popular with the end consumers and we began to grow rapidly.
Pavel Pavlov: You managed to reach a certain compromise between the universality of the platform, which would be suitable for many groups of users, and the space for flexibility and fine-tuning.
Ruslan Sinitsky: Yes, I think we managed to find a balance.
Pavel Pavlov: How long did it come to this?
Ruslan Sinitsky: We went to this at the level of intuition. I will not say that we are fully aware of. Intuitively. Even our deal with Runa Capital, which, in fact, turned out by chance. But we already knew that we would be okay, we would make a deal with Runa Capital and get access to Parallels, one of the leaders in the field of virtualization. Having access to these technologies and talking to the tech guys inside this company, we appreciated how much potential this company has with a very good virtualization product. And we made it the basis. Then it turned out that the product has an advantage that other Platform-as-a-Service does not have - vertical scaling, the ability to automatically scale applications, complete isolation of resources, that is, each application can be allocated isolated resources and can be allowed to write files to the file system, the ability to migrate the application between the iron servers without downtime. That is, in the process we began to find our virtues. I will not say that it was originally a clear plan. Initially, it was planned to avoid any requirements for changes in the user application.
When we created the first version of our Hivext product, we gathered 5,000 users, and this Hivext was similar to the Google App Engine - Backend-as-a-Serivce. The disadvantage of this approach is that users cannot enclose a standard application, they cannot use the experience gained - they have to write an application again. Accordingly, for a small startup, this is a road to nowhere. Large companies will not go there, only small startups, which in principle are not able to pay money at the initial stage. Having learned from this, we decided to make the main disadvantage in the next version of our platform. We said that we will make a platform that does not require rewriting your code.
We are constantly learning, creating something, testing it on the market, receiving feedback and improving our product. And even our recent changes in the direction of Platform-as-Infrastructure happened thanks to the experience accumulated over the entire period of our work.
Alexander Astapenko: Very similar to the Lean-approach.
Ruslan Sinitsky: Yes, it almost looks like. Honestly, I did not read it initially, but then, when the time passed and I found a book, I read it and understood that we are very close to it.
Alexander Astapenko: But when you come to hosters or some corporate clients, not everyone has Parallels products with which you need to integrate. Each of them has its own environment. I understand that you encounter every time a new separate case that needs to be solved - how to integrate with this or that partner? Can you tell us a little about it?
Ruslan Sinitsky: This was especially true for the first versions of Jelastic. We did not understand what other requirements are needed for iron. Up to the end did not understand where the space will be for maneuver. If we talk about virtualization, we also did not understand whether it is possible to launch our product in other virtualization layers, based on the same Amazon or Rackspace. Indeed, the billing system for each partner is often samopisnaya, some use some standard solutions, but there are a certain number of these solutions. Over time, we improved our product and currently received a boxed solution. We come to the hoster and say: “To run Jelastic, you need iron with these requirements ...”. Virtualization, non-virtualization - it does not interest him, he doesn’t touch the Parallels virtualization system at all. If we talk about billing, we have created our own internal virtual billing, all processes take place inside Jelastic and now we integrate at the API level, telling any hosting billing system that at the end of the month you need to withdraw so much money from the user. How they shoot is their questions.
The further the product develops, the more versatile it becomes, the easier it is to maintain, more documentation, user cases, less initial resource requirements for running Jelastic appear.
Alexander Astapenko: And how is the process going on? Who does the integration? Specialists from the host or someone on your part? And as far as the process is controlled by the hoster? How much do they want to control it?
Ruslan Sinitsky: The first integrations were almost blind. When we went through this several times, we realized that the processes are repeated. Accordingly, a master plan was created. This is not only installing software, but also fine tuning, preparing marketing materials, preparing the site, customizing letter templates that are sent to users, localizing. Therefore, the integration is painted on clear steps on each side: on the side of Jelastic or hoster. For the integration of Jelastic stand out two people. This is the account manager who leads the project (mostly non-technical specialist). This is a person who speaks good English and has good communication skills. And the second person is a techie who directly performs the technical work: Jelastic installation, configuration, analysis, if something went wrong. There are actions that must be performed on the side of the hoster. This list is issued to the host and the account manager runs with the project manager on the host side for each item, explains what needs to be done, leads the host on the project. Today, this is a fully predictable process and we can roughly estimate how long it will take to integrate with a particular hoster, plan our own resources.
Alexander Astapenko: It can be seen that the process has already been prepared over the years. I understand that in the beginning it was not at all like that. You went through your own experience. Right?
Ruslan Sinitsky: It was dreadful initially, to be honest. We are lucky that we have found a person who, when there is chaos, throws him into this chaos and there immediately becomes order. Such a person is necessary for the company.
Alexander Astapenko: In Russia, at the end of the 90s, such a person was thrown at the government of the country, we heard about it.
Ruslan Sinitsky: Well, yes)
Alexander Astapenko: I want to return now to the product itself, which also developed, as well as the integration process. Who deals with product related issues in a company? How a decision is made will one or another feature enter the product, evaluate its prospects, what life cycle it goes through. As you said, you are launching something, testing it on the market, getting feedback, changing, and so on in this cycle. Who does this and what does the process look like?
Ruslan Sinitsky: When there were 5--7 people, this question was solved easier, fewer people and big things were more obvious. When people become more and more work begins to appear, then everything becomes more complicated. Therefore, it is necessary to implement certain processes. We invited specialists who came to our team and set up processes. This concerned the process of determining the priority of a particular functional. Today we use Agile, we use backlog.
There are many sources of information, from where we draw directions for the potential development of our product. First of all, these are end users. We always hear the final developers: what is convenient, what is uncomfortable, what they like, what they don’t like, what restrictions there are. We periodically analyze the support channel. Caliper engineers send a report in one direction or another every week, which functions were the most requested. We hear our partner hosts, who also have certain requests for cluster management, or they fail to attract an additional segment of users, because they cannot provide this or that function. We have an understanding of where we want to develop our product. We have needs internal, refactoring modules. Someone in the team may not like how this or that solution is designed architecturally and it has the best offer. There is a need for operations, an installation team, they want to reduce the time spent on it. Directions are becoming more and more.
At the moment, I communicate with each lead of directions (on support, on communication with hosters, etc.) and we are collecting feedback, a kind of flat list. In it we hold a vote, that is, each person in the direction determines the most priority functionality. This is then analyzed and I make up the final roadmap for release. We once again discuss this roadmap with key employees and come to the fact that everyone understands why these features are the most critical in the current release.
Alexander Astapenko: So you can say that you are the person who forms the Jelastic product?
Ruslan Sinitsky: You can say this, but I want to emphasize that the product is formed by the whole team. It's just that I am the person who collects information from different sources, listens to the arguments of different parties why this is important, hear the pain of different people and try to set priorities correctly. To explain to some people why, for example, the feature proposed by another department is more important than the one offered by them. Then the team will understand where the product develops, there will be no internal conflicts, wars. It is very important. That is, I am a kind of mediator at the current stage.
Alexander Astapenko: Well, the features have gathered, lined up priorities, hit the release and the market. How do you decide the feature you need and it remains or remove it from the product? Or you do not remove those features that go there?
Ruslan Sinitsky: We are trying to make an MVP (Minimum viable product) - something that is easy to do in one squat, which is basically complete and solves a particular problem. We try to give it to the end users and look at their reaction, that is, we collect feedback. , , . - , . . , . -, - , , . , . , . , Ruby , . Ruby. 100% , , . : , 80%, 90% . , 95% ?
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Continuation of the text version of the podcast - in the coming days.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/204120/
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