My experience as a Leader in the software industry. Part I.

A journey through a woman who succeeded being a leader

4 min readOct 12, 2022

Content Part I:

Introduction to myself
My new challenge as a leader
New mission and goals to achieve
The development process and the result obtained

Introduction to myself

My name is Maira from Argentina. I am a software engineer and a digital nomad. I’ve been traveling for more than 6 countries for the last 2 years, and I am living in Tallinn, Estonia, at the moment.

I’ve been in IT nearly all my life: my mother was one of the first women who studied and worked as a programmer in my city, La Plata, Buenos Aires, in 1983. Computers were very familiar to me since I was a little girl and I remembered drawing with Logo the turtle and using Windows MS-DOS for exploring the computer. I started computer science at the university of La Plata in 2009, Argentina. But before I started working in the software market, I’ve been practicing politics in my university for 4 years, representing the students in a regulary board meeting with authorities and teachers from university. I started working in the software market since 2014 ang getting involved in web and mobile development, using different technologies such as Ruby on Rails, Cardano Blockchain, Nodejs and Typescript. I am actually a Senior Backend developer focused in Nodejs since 2019.

My new challenge as a leader

By the end of October 2021 I received an invitation: a company from Argentina was looking for a software developer who could understand the client’s requirements and lead a team, already hired, to deliver a mobile application. It was a big opportunity in front of me, so I took a new challenge. It was not my first time managing people, but it was in software.

New mission and goals to achieve

I found myself with a new mission and with huge goals to achieve:

My new mission:

Taking the desires of the client and creating a mobile application using the resources the company provided me in a roadmap defined (or in a period of time).

My goals as a Team Leader:

with the client: Taking their requirements for building themobile application and communicating/notifying them the advances until the mobile app is launched.
with the project: Achieve the roadmap defined with the client.
with the team: Follow up the proccess from begining to the end in order to guide the team and each member to complete the goals of each sprint.
with the company: maneging the resources (including human resources) provided by the company to create and delivery in time the mobile application. Teach the processes and methodologies used to the team in order to reproduce them in a next project.

The development process and the result obtained

The development process

We started with meetings with the client and the functional analyst. Once We’ve got the main requirements, We wrote down the user stories with the roadmap. An example as follow:

And after presenting the Roadmap, the UX/UI team presented to the client the prototypes using Adobe XD. An example as follow:

Link to Adobe XD design

Once the prototype was reviewed and approved by the client, We started coding the app:

The back-end team began programming the API Rest with Nodejs, Express and MongoDb using “Clean Architecture”.

The front-end team began programming with React Native and Typescript.

The devops team began the automatization for CI/CD strategies and preparing AWS lambda for dev, staging and production environments.

I was also the backend technical leader, I was responsible for conducting the back-end dailies, doing code revies and taking most of the technical decisions.

Once one or more features were closed and finished, we presented to the client. An example as follow:

The result obtained

We developed the MVP for Monterrey Institue of Technology of Mexico, and We published the mobile app Google Play and Apple Store ready to be download by the students 🥳 🥳 🥳