Competent management - myth or reality? Kolesa Group, Evil Martians and Wrike answer

Should employees feel how well they are managed by the management in the company and how well everything functions, thanks to competent managers? Or should good management be invisible, like a convenient interface that you use without realizing its existence?

In the wake of our ranking of the best IT employers, we continue to talk with companies in order to discover their best qualities under the new column “Company Rating in Details” and tell them how they understand what their own employees value them for.
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In the first issue, we discussed professional growth with Dodo Pizza, Icons8 and Evil Martians. Today, Kolesa Group, Evil Martians and Wrike will talk about the importance of good management for business growth and development, and how they find and develop their managers.

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Evil Martians is a distributed team of open-source engineers who do product development for startups and large companies in the West and in Russia.

Evaluation of the company on "My Circle".

Andrei Kozin (team leader in Evil Martians):

A competent manager brings the project to success in all possible ways.
He must prevent friction within the team, avoid misunderstandings between the team and customers. Martian managers are able to solve the problem of lack of or inefficient use of resources, reduce risks and remove uncertainty around projects.

Maxim Kushner (Evil Martians Project Manager):

All managers in our team have technical background and own experience.
development - without this it would be difficult to speak with the team and the client in the same language. The Martian manager is able to independently understand whether
technical decisions made within the project boundary and deadlines.
We do not have an internship institute and we assume that every manager who gets to Mars is already quite “literate”.

Polina Gurtovaya (frontend developer at Evil Martians):

It seems to me that a truly competent management should not be noticeable and should not interfere with the work of employees. In Evil Martians, I never felt that the features of management processes make me less effective, on the contrary - a lot of attention is paid to open-source contracts, conferences, and interesting tasks. This is part of my job, and not something that I would have to do in my free time. This allows me to constantly learn and develop.

Maxim Kushner:

We constantly keep ourselves in good shape: we follow the news from the world of start-ups, current technologies, market trends, features of product analysis.

We adhere to the principles of lean development, so from the first day of work with
the client is trying to understand the goals of the company, what problem does its product solve,
what are the expectations and metrics of success. In each project we ask
customer to designate the “owner” of the product responsible for the concept. From the Martians side, the manager can be connected to this task, not replacing, but complementing this role (for example, in terms of analytics or choice of priorities).

Ultimately, it is important for us to see a constant movement towards the project’s goal and to have
opportunity to measure the result.

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Wrike is an American company headquartered in California, developing the same product for project management.

Evaluation of the company on "My Circle".

Tatyana Savelyeva (HR director and general director of the Russian office of Wrike):

Successfully lead project management we are helped by several factors.

Competent goal setting . In Wrike, we at one time thoroughly attended to the choice of the optimal approach to goal setting at the level of the whole company and individual teams, and as a result, instead of the usual KPI, we stopped at OKR (Objectives & Key Results concept - goals and key results).

The essence of OKR is to exclude from the goal setting a way to achieve it and, at the same time, provide an opportunity for an objective assessment. This allows you to avoid micromanagement - the leader can concentrate on priorities, realize her creative potential, and the team can find a way to achieve the goal on her own and objectively evaluate the result.

Measurable results allows you to accurately determine whether the goal has been achieved. If not, this is a reason to analyze the reasons for the failure and input data for subsequent planning. The OKR of the whole company and each team is transparent and accessible to every riker.

Transparency and availability of information . It is important for us that all employees understand what goals we are going, how well we succeed, and what difficulties we face. All OKRs are available to everyone, including the percentage of their achievement. Every month we hold Allhands rallies with updates, including financial indicators. All departments maintain weekly reports on their work, which, again, are accessible to all.

In development teams, we use scrum, which implies transparency and participation of the whole team in planning, assigning responsibility and evaluating results. Evaluation is measurable, objective and independent of the manager’s personality.


Wrike meeting

We are for non- direct management , we appreciate constant feedback and transparency. We practice regular surveys that help us understand what we can do better. For example, 360 surveys on all managers, a general satisfaction survey. We regularly help managers grow through trainings, conferences, and experience sharing. An important role is played by the HR team, which works in conjunction with the leaders, helps to introduce best practices.

An important component for us is that we use our own product for managing internal projects.

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Kolesa Group or Wheels Wheels Market is the largest IT company based in Kazakhstan. Owns the services of placing private ads on the sale and purchase of cars, real estate and things kolesa.kz, krisha.kz, market.kz, avtoelon.uz (Uzbekistan), which are used daily by millions of people.

Evaluation of the company on "My Circle".

Karina Bytsina @KarinaTsar ( Acting Project Manager for Market.kz at Kolesa Group):

Historically, the Kolesa Group has a strong technological expertise in the IT market in Kazakhstan, so a high score is logical and quite expected. In my opinion, this is due to the fact that the requirements for hiring managers are as high as for programmers, designers and testers.

In the IT field, a competent manager should know how time is assessed, the need for refactoring, what technical debt affects and what risks are possible. They understand the difference between Wishlist and necessity, the feasibility of the functionality and the like. It is important that the manager himself understands and can explain to others what and why the company and the individual team are doing.

Without this knowledge, the manager will not be able to productively communicate with the team and demotivates everyone. People will think: “he still does not understand what I am saying, why explain, I will do as I ask, even if it’s a garbage.”

We have some managers have a technical background, and employees especially appreciate it. Although such a background is not the determining factor in hiring.

Ksenia Drokina (HR Director, Kolesa Group):

We adhere to the horizontal management model. Minimize the number of
executives. Everyone has equal rights, we do not single out anyone.

Managers are evaluated in two ways:

1. Figures - how successful the project is, how fast it is developing.
2. People - twice a year the team and the manager evaluates the manager.

Ksenia Drokina, HR Director, Kolesa Group

We take managers from the market, we grow someone from our own. We conduct internal trainings - Institute of Management. There are Wheels Academy with the direction of "Project Management" - when we take university graduates and in the framework of the three-month internship we educate children. Each team has the right to choose independently whether they will work on skram or kanban. The main thing is the result.

Amangeldy Kadyl (Senior software engineer Kolesa Group):

I would say that the management in our company differs from many others in Kazakhstan in the ability to listen not only to the business, but also to its employees. Our company consists of very different people with different hobbies, points of view. But we work as a single organism - our management has managed to create such an atmosphere of rallying.

Anna Vasilenko @esabril (backend developer of the Kolesa Group):

A competent manager monitors trends in the development of products similar to his own. He is “on the same wavelength” with his team and knows what to do in order for the team to grow and develop. Allows the company to be confident in their own abilities. This confidence is worth a lot, because the rules of the game in business can change, and the larger the company, the harder it is for it to remain a single organism. Without proper management this cannot be achieved.


Kolesa Group employees at work

Our company is growing every day, the number of employees is increasing year by year, and with it the quality of products is also growing. The teams are no longer afraid to make bold decisions, we have a lot of ideas and plans that we implement - all of this would not have happened if the really talented people had not been involved in the management.

Here it is important not only to reach your level, but also to raise it from time to time - then you will always be higher and better than the previous one.