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1 year in ABBYY: Part 2 - Base Complaints, Slippers and ABBYY Road

Good day to all.

I continue the trilogy about the “pros, cons and pitfalls” of work in ABBYY. In the first part, I told how I was employed, now let's move on to how the processes are organized and what the product manager of mobile phones can face during the first six months of work in the company.

First day at work and birthday


I went to work on April 14 and literally the next day I already celebrated my birthday in the team. I was very embarrassed about this and was somewhat afraid, but in the end everything went well. Gave the shirt “You're in the ABBYY now”, ABBYY backpack and branded slippers :) And it became somehow much easier. When people go to work in slippers - it greatly simplifies everything.


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HR has been babysitting all day with me, explaining about the corporate portal and the necessary rights for working with documents. Gradually I got accustomed to working with internal systems and the work started.

We work in cubicles, each with their own workplace, most often with 2 monitors. However, some teams are sitting together, I confess this approach more, but sometimes I really want peace and tranquility. Many copies are broken about the pros and cons (in general, as elsewhere, it depends on people and processes). In support of common spaces, there is such a study ; in defense of personal space and silence, there is another .

Schedule free. That is, in general. Plus you can work from home with the agreement. The main thing is to work out the number of hours per month. Time is automatically recorded when going to the office, and through VPN. Of course, it is advisable to be in the office from 12 to 17, as general team activities are usually scheduled for this time.



Products, team and communication


I started working as a product manager for one of the company's “oldest” mobile applications - ABBYY Business Card Reader . This is a business card scanner that allows you to digitize and save them into contacts. It was released even under Symbian and in December celebrated its 5th anniversary. That was such a handsome man:



And this is how the first version for iPhone looked like, which started at the end of 2010 (who had an iPhone at that time, confess?)



Since then, of course, the product has evolved greatly and can already synchronize business cards, export to Salesforce, share via Wi-fi and much more. In 2015, we plan big changes in the product. And of course, the recognition quality itself will be the best in the class. They even started looking for more iOS developers for this business. If you have experience developing cool iOS-pieces, unit tests are not terrible and there is a desire to pick up new features of iOS9 and Apple Watch - welcome.

Recently, other OCR products have also come under my jurisdiction: ABBYY FineScanner (mobile scanner) and ABBYY TextGrabber (offline text recognizer + online translator), so it’s not boring to be exact. The second mobile team has flagship ABBYY Lingvo , its new social guise, Lingvo Live , as well as Phrasebooks .

The team is pretty standard: programmers, testers, marketers and designers. Everything you need to collaborate on a product. By the way, it was very surprising that people work in the company for a long time. Information from personnel officers, that about half of the employees have been working for more than five years, almost a hundred of them are more than ten years old, and there are some very long-livers - about 40 people have been working at ABBYY for more than fifteen years. In my team, for example, there is an iOS programmer with 10 years of experience in the company.

Since everything is close by, the main working tool is the legs :) To see new prototypes with the designer, it’s easier, and often more efficient, to come up and talk.

Weekly meetings of the department are held on Mondays, on Thursdays - command teams, with plans for the future and interesting observations. Well, the traditional daily stand-ups (we call “fast-hangouts”) - wherever without them.

Final or demanding communications go through e-mail, for quick communication there is a corporate Lync and for general project management there is an internal bug tracker for all the company's products - the “complaint base”.



There are really a lot of internal own products: from the release base of products (1298 major releases were released at the company) or budget planning tools (OLAP-cubes in all its glory) to colleagues' residence cards and birthday greetings service. Honestly, not everything is convenient and simple, but there is an own automation department that accepts users and completes the systems to the needs and aspirations of users.



By the way, automation tools are quite typical: version control via SVN, Continuous Integration based on TeamCity. The builds run on several Mac Mini 2012 i7s with 16Gb RAM and SSD (thank God, they managed to buy them, 2014 is just a hell of a lot). I really want to fasten the automation of updating the new builds and screenshots into the stores with the help of fastlane.tools , but since there are screenshots of the camera work in each product, it will not work on the simulator.

About duties


In the work of the product manager, the main thing is understanding the trends and “listening to the market”, so analytics and research are an important part of the work. It can be said that each release should receive evidence of the relevance of the functional, and not be based on the personal opinion of anyone. For mobile products (due to short development cycles), the set of such confirmations is shortened, but in any case, the development vector is formed in the form of a product concept, which includes:

There are a lot of sources of information for its creation (I would say crazy a lot):

We participate in the main mobile events. Were this year at Mobile Congress, last year at WWDC, and I was honored to get on Google IO 2014. It was very cool to dive into the world android environment, we made a lot of useful contacts. Highly recommend.



What I do not like, in contrast to the above, is the complexity of a number of processes. For example, a trip to any event is always a “holiday” with collecting checks, careful keeping badges and filling in endless forms. The Organizing Committee was even simpler - standard business trip and daily subsistence orders.

Since a number of work processes are “sharpened” for Large Complex Technologies with two-year development cycles, we in the mobile department have to defend ourselves from attempts to offer to follow corporate standards, for example, formulating strategies, concepts, hypotheses and other big serious documents that are written longer than a release is being prepared. We work in a shorter production cycle than the rest of the company.

Releases


The company got accustomed to Kanban, so we work on the board in JIRA (more on that in the next part) and are released once a month. Since there are a lot of products, it turns out every week something from our products is updated.

Inspired by the negotiation with board games, on the occasion of successful releases, he introduced the tradition of eating ice cream and playing board games. Recently, it is most often “Imaginarium”. “Mafia,” to be honest, I don’t quite understand because of the emphasis on general suspicion and attempts to justify myself, but the company also has a club of fans of this business.



Also, the various positive moments in releases are celebrated with souvenirs of the most distinguished. There are a lot of them at ABBYY. Best of all are slippers and beavers :)



This year also, surprisingly, “hooked” SharlotkaChallenge. A colleague brought his own baked charlotte and “summoned to a duel” by other colleagues following the example of the Ice Bucket Challenge. As a result, almost every day we had home-made cakes from different people and the competition spread beyond the bounds of the department and even the company.



Outside working


Since in the comments to the first part of the post they asked for more about work and less for buns - I’m short about them.
ABBYY Academy is actively developed inside the company, where courses are held both in project management or effective communication, and in algorithms. When I have time, I’m happy to visit, I even plan to conduct training on an effective “mobile” life, because seeing how people can’t change the standard ringtone or don’t know how to use promotional codes in stores, every time I tremble.

In addition, there are courses in English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Chinese. Well, "visiting" guest performers regularly come. For example, recently there was a very interesting training on teamwork.

The fact that the company pays great attention to the hobbies and development of employees - this is little said. For example, I love volleyball, and the company pays half the rent for the hall. This year they even took part in the Amateur Volleyball League. You can also buy a subscription in the X-fit next to the office with a 50% refund.



Also, my wife and I are very pleased with salsa lessons from Dmitry Ganzevich, one of the best "New Yorker" in Moscow. Instead of going somewhere in the evening to the Polyanka area, Dima comes to us himself. We have been practicing salsa since 2005 and, in general, met my wife at a dance school, so we have very warm feelings for her. And glad that it is in the company.

There are several other types of yoga, acrobatics, athletic gymnastics, football, basketball, vocals, theater studio, an active community of cyclists who organize various pokatushki even in winter. I myself actively ride a scooter and the community of scooters also actively support.



Summer with ABBYY



Several cool events during this time were combined into the so-called “Summer with ABBYY”. I participated in the rally ABBYY Road in Kolomna + Ryazan. It was really very cool and sincere, with many colleagues I met and made friends, considering that during the rally I knew almost no one. Also took part in a master class on lindy-hop (not hooked) and rope course (very pleased, I recommend!). Participation is subsidized at 50% and well organized. I look forward to next summer, because the program was just great.

ABBYY quarter of a century

In the same year, ABBYY celebrated its 25th anniversary.



Now it’s hard to remember when I first used ABBYY FineReader, but the feeling that I had a program almost with the advent of the computer (and this, God bless me, 1996), therefore, participating in the celebration of the 25th anniversary was enough for me nostalgic. I heard a lot of stories about several moves (I especially liked how they worked in kindergarten “in the middle group” ), a lot of prototypes, ideas, about failures and victories. There is still some additional advantage for companies with great experience and a cool team that has lived together for so many years.



Celebrated in "Planet KVN", the teams ABBYY and ABBYY Language Services competed in humor, then there was a concert of our group ABBYY Band, "Accident" and a disco. But most of all I didn’t remember it, but songs with a guitar in the lobby before leaving home. I did not want to leave ...



So in working days and happy holidays, my first half a year in the company passed. In the last part of the trilogy - about the second half, “changes” in all senses, as well as holidays in ABBYY, do not switch.

PS The same “terrible secret” that only employees know. In fact, the name of the company is not read ebi or “hey, beat-bi, wai-wai”, but Ábi :)

Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/256779/

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