February 11: The Techleads meetup. How to create and maintain dynamic development

The time has come to announce our second Techleads-metap for leads, department heads and SRT, created to combine technology, development and management on one platform. It will be held on February 11 in the office of Badoo in Moscow. Beginning: at 12:00.

At the last meeting we discussed the topics of the mobile web, testing, technology and communications. This time all the speeches at the mitap are united by one common theme: how to create and maintain dynamic development in the context of constant growth of the team and changes in the company.

The topic is so interesting that we could not stop while choosing the speakers at the meeting. You will like it: Max Lapshin (Erlyvideo), Evgeny Potapov (ITSumma) will perform with their stories, Badoo - Alexei Rybak, Ilya Pyatin (CarPrice) and Andrei Shelekhin (Tinkoff.ru). Under the cut - the schedule of performances.

Speakers and Topics

Max Lapshin, Erlyvideo

Topic: How to create a small and profitable software company, if you are a programmer?

In the report, I will talk about a fairly successful history of the calm development of a company engaged in a difficult thing: we make niche software, which is the technological basis for foreign businesses.

I will talk about:

• how we plan the development of software, which is then sold in 100 countries around the world. What we are doing now, what then and what we are doing with what is impossible to do.
• What are we doing to not make ourselves a daily stress? The specificity of product development, which is very far from the end users and is not fundamentally tested in-house in full.
• how we simplify our work to move forward while keeping stress levels low.

What turns out, and with what bad cope.

Evgeny Potapov, ITSumma

Topic: Technical support of sites as a business: people, management, processes

The processes associated with supporting the project have always stood apart in the planning and development of the company. How can you save benchmarks in a sharp change of priorities? How can you keep and develop a team in this constant stress? Evgeny Potapov will tell about his development history of support in conditions when it is necessary to support not one project, but 200. The history of the company's growth from 3 to 60 people.

1. Staff issues:
   - how to find and train the right people
   - specifics of shift work
   - exchange of experience and knowledge in a team

   
   

2. Process Management:
   - specifics of setting tasks related to support and prompt response
   - planning in the conditions of chaotic change of priorities

   
   
3. Monitoring technical support as a means of minimizing the human factor:
   - processing incoming requests
   - monitoring of time spent on tasks
   - organization and automation of "back office".

Alexey Rybak, Badoo

Topic: Performance Review on guard of values ​​in a dynamic company.

Many engineers nervously twist their faces when they hear the words "performance assessment." Someone recalls the rumors about Microsoft's orders, some are meaningless, long forms that have to be filled once a year by order from above.
Manager Mutoten!

Engineers can not be measured, review only interfere!

KPI for engineers do not work, only annoying!

All this can be heard during the performance review discussion, and probably, in many cases, this is true.

Badoo is an engineering company, and, of course, we were not born with performance review. Our first acquaintance happened a long time ago when, it seemed, we were about six years old. Then in our company there was a senior comrade who had already dealt with a performance review, and he persuaded us to try. We decided, convincing ourselves: “Well, once or twice. We can always stop. ”

In general, we liked it so much that the review has since been working for us with almost no changes, and we can no longer imagine how to live without it. With the help of it, we relay our values, share news, thank you, tell colleagues where to grow, and this process helps a lot with technical support.

In this report I will tell:

• simple rules for a successful review;
• how we created and implemented the process itself;
• what problems and how we solve them;
• do you even need a review.

Ilya Pyatin, CarPrice

Topic: How did the processes in IT change, when the company grew by 20% every month for two years

In my report, I want to talk about how effectively the structure and processes in IT are changing during the growth of the company. For two years in a row, I came every month to a “new” company, which was 15–20% more than the one where I worked a month ago. New projects and experiments were constantly launched, and the hierarchy and the development scheme a month ago were no longer suitable for CarPrice of a new sample, and they had to be changed so as not to slow down. I'm going to talk about the evolution of processes and tools, as well as about the things that have successfully passed with us through all these stages of development.

Let's talk about:

1. What to do when your company is a startup?
2. What to do when your company suddenly ceased to be a startup?
3. How to quickly scale the environment and development environment
4. How to quickly recruit programmers to the team, so that later they do not fall off
5. Management - from a couple of developers to a large department
6. Approach to system architecture and implementation of experiments

Andrey Shelokhin, Tinkoff.ru

Topic: Vzhuh, and you have Agile!

You want to build a quality development process. It seems that around the mass of sources that will help. For example, books on Agile and Scrum, explaining what is actually written in the 17-page Scrum Guide; trainings that will finally explain to your inflexible developers about the healing properties of the board with stickers, that story points are better than ideal hours, and how to punish those who are late for the Daily Meeting.

All these are ready-made approaches and practices. Start applying ready-made solutions without understanding what is hidden behind them, and they will be not only useless, but also dangerous for your process.

There is another kind of help - an external consultant. He is ready to work with the team every day until each of the participants learns to explain the difference between Agile and Scrum, fit the User Story on the sticker and tell how the day went. But the external consultant does not guarantee you success. Contacting the wrong one will only make it worse and just lose time and money.

The solution is to independently and consciously build development processes based on common sense and the surrounding reality.
How can I do this, I will tell in the report. Using the example of the internal development department of Tinkoff, we analyze our checklist of the correct development process and the questions:

• What do development managers forget?
• Can processes solve problems in development without interfering with business?
• How to break the rules described in the books about Scrum, and not blame yourself for it?

Program mitap

You can arrive at 11:00, we will treat you to coffee.

11:00: Registration starts
11:55: Opening remarks
12:00 - 12:30: Max Lapshin (Erlyvideo)
12:30 - 12:40: Questions
12:45 - 13:15: Yevgeny Potapov (ITSumma)
13:15 - 13:25: Questions
1:30 pm - 2:00 pm: Alexey Rybak (Badoo)
14:00 - 14:10: Questions
14:10 - 14:40: Lunch Break / Excursions to Badoo office
14:45 - 15:15: Ilya Pyatin (CarPrice)
15:15 - 15:25: Questions
15:30 - 16:00: Andrey Shelekhin (Tinkoff.ru)
16:00 - 16:10: Questions
16:10 - 16:40: Free communication

Register for the mitap - here: https://badoo-development.timepad.ru/event/437019/ (write your names and surnames in Cyrillic, please).
Address: Moscow, Tsvetnoy Boulevard, 2, Legenda Tsvetnogo business center, entrance A. Metro: Trubnaya / Tsvetnoy Boulevard.