Socialbakers

I came to Socialbakers with a clear mission: I wanted to be The Scrum Master. The servant leader, helping people around, facilitating the important discussions and guiding people towards better teamwork. It was a great time, I was working with super smart people, they usually understood what I am saying, were open to trying things and company management was listening to our points. Honestly, I envy my past self. From the team level perspective, things are easy. 

I guess I was successful in the job, as I received more teams to serve, I was representing the company by speaking about Agile development on several occasions. I cherish my memories from this time and even though I understand how human memory works, I still consider this as one of best work experiences I ever had. 

Now, it is hard to explain what went wrong from my perspective. Board decided to change the top management, for the reasons I understood, but the impact I experienced was company divided, ruled by politics, losing direction. I was reluctant to abandon Socialbakers, I built a lot there and I really didn’t want to part my ways with the company. But the discussions about problems we experienced in engineering teams were ending with no results for several months and I left. I decided to join 2Fresh, a great digital agency in Prague.

I wanted to win the market. The idea when I joined 2Fresh was that with my superior knowledge regarding the product development process, we rise to the stars like Bitcoin (yes that was the time when it reached almost $20k). Thing is that building products is expensive and fitting the process to the company with the majority of clients seeking “only website” is tricky. But this hard hit from this very different reality was great. In a year, I learned a lot. Great concepts like design thinking with some core practices opened my eyes in a field of product development and applying this knowledge with real customers gave me experience I’ll never get inside Socialbakers. But in some time I realized that I am following the mission I’ve had at the beginning. It wasn’t working and I want to send big thanks to people at 2Fresh who discussed with me for hours and hours. I hope I opened some right questions and moved the right things, but it was clear that I am not helping the company.

You can guess from the homepage that I returned to Socialbakers, but it was actually a very hard decision. In the end, I came back because of people I love here. I don’t say that much, but I really think that our people are the biggest asset of the company. I came back to help Socialbakers to return to glory and I hope I am doing my part. I have a lot of interviews with the candidates, so I managed to introduce myself as a router and reducer. A simplification that a lot of them consider funny, but not that far from the reality. I am responsible for delivering features and feature improvements in our SaaS application. That means a lot of talking with our Scrum Masters, developers and product people. And thinking about where we are going as an industry, poking here and there to make sure that we will have great engineering even next year and another after that. 

Which is the reason why I built this blog. Well, except the reason I stated before. I was digging in front end performance and because I always want to understand problems at least to some degree, I decided to build some real projects in several javascript frameworks. You can see them on my github. Yes, I am still a nerd.