Introducing Airlift’s Engineering and Leadership Blog
It gives me immense pleasure to announce Airlift’s Engineering and Leadership Blog — a shared space where individuals and teams from all over the Company will be sharing their stories. The people behind Airlift — who are responsible for powering Pakistan’s first app-based mass transit system — never cease to amaze. The relentlessness and the hustle that I have seen from this specific group has been next to crazy. And it is because of this attitude, and this attitude only, that Airlift got to where it is today.
What does it mean to be relentless at Airlift? It means that we will be resourceful in finding solutions to problems, that we will break through walls to achieve end-outcomes. Being relentless in our pursuits lies at the core of our operating values.
Year 1 at Airlift was super crazy in so many ways.
The extreme level of development, hyper growth, raising the first ever Series A funding for a Pakistan-based startup, and the speed at which Airlift achieved growth has been phenomenal and unprecedented. This speed, however, came at a cost of technical debt on the engineering side and loose processes on the business side. We knew what these issues were. We knew what impact these issues would have in the long run. We just didn’t have the time to solve them. And although our customers helped us build a community that stuck by us despite the shortcomings, we needed to solve these issues to better our product.
And that is why, when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, we didn’t take that as a sign of weakness. While we were not excited to temporarily pause our service, which was an important part of our customers’ daily lives, we didn’t let the pandemic bring us down. We didn’t stand down and simply wait for it to pass.
No.
We stopped, took a deep breath, re-calibrated and started to focus on how we could make this time invaluable and indispensable for us. We asked ourselves — what would have to be true for us to thrive in the new environment? What needed to be our new focus? How could we use focus and composure to adapt, and to capitalize on the opportunities created in the post-COVID-19 world?
And that’s when we decided on a theme for Year 2 at Airlift.
In Year 2, we’re going to be focusing on improvements and refinements. Things that’ll not only improve our current processes but also take us to the next level of scale.
In this regard, the people at Airlift led with focus, composure and speed. Individuals and teams came forward across all the functions, identified the major pain points and took the initiative to fix them. In just a span of three months since the lock down started, so many features and processes across so many different functions have been fixed. This simply would not have been possible had we been running operations on the side.
And from that attitude stemmed the growth of this blog; an opportunity for all individuals at Airlift to be involved in building a culture of writing across the team, as well as sharing this with the entire ecosystem in Pakistan. Airlift will always continue to lead the way for Pakistani startups by adopting global best practices and by introducing them to the local community. In doing so, our hope is that the impact of our work creates waves of innovation across the country.
Expect this blog to see a flurry of activity over the next few months. We can’t wait to share with the world what we’ve been working on and how exactly we make things happen!
Hussain works on the Technology Team as a Full-Stack Software Engineer. He loves to read, explore new technologies and has recently taken up writing as a hobby. He can be reached at hussain.ali@rideairlift.com. To join our team, please click here to visit our job board to browse open positions.
