Timur’s SpaceUP Journey

Hello Timur! Let’s begin with your journey to Ataccama. How long have you been with us, and how did you get here?

I’ve been in Ataccama for about a year. I was a subcontractor back in Kazakhstan before coming to the Czech Republic six months ago, and I’ve been here ever since.

It’s actually a funny story…back in Kazakhstan, I’d already been working for the past three or four years in local companies. And the biggest issue in the Kazakhstan market is that 90% of companies, of tasks, of projects, they’re all B2G — Business to Government. And for many people, including myself, those processes, with a lot of bureaucracy and low-quality products, weren’t the best. I started thinking that I would like to work in an English-speaking team or company, to have a look into how business is going in different parts of the world, especially Europe. I like these destinations. I like the Czech Republic because a lot of students from Kazakhstan come here to study in the universities, so I already had a lot of friends here. When I asked them about the country or the people, most of them said it’s cool. I like it here — it’s proper Europe, but it’s not expensive. :)

I started looking for companies on LinkedIn. And I basically just found Ataccama. I liked the logo, the colors, the way it looks and thought “Okay, well, why not?” I read a bit about the company, I assumed that it’s a kind of startup but they already had around 200 people working there. So it wasn’t like a startup, it was something bigger than that. I applied and the recruiter contacted me in a few weeks. And after that, I had technical interviews and stuff like this, and at first they rejected me. At the very last interview, they told me you’re good, but we need someone more senior.

But I stayed in contact with the recruiter. I was literally texting her maybe once a week asking if there were any new opportunities, and she was very kind. So last October, half a year after my first interview, she texted me saying, “Hey, you have an interview tomorrow. Is that okay?” I said sure, why not? The interview was just asking about general things, like, where do you see yourself in five years and stuff like this. We talked for maybe half an hour and the recruiter called me on WhatsApp, because she knew I was really expecting a lot from this interview.

I was really excited about this opportunity. I thought, Okay, this is probably my chance. She called me after maybe 20 minutes and said “You’re hired!” Then I started preparing the documents. It’s a very long process, it took me almost half a year. And that’s how I got here.

And how was the beginning compared to what you had been doing before? What were your biggest surprises, where you needed to learn quickly or adjust?

So I had two first impressions of the company — one when I started to work as a subcontractor, and one when I came here. It was basically all the same. First of all, it wasn’t my first experience with a completely English-speaking team, but it’s a big company, and business is built completely differently here. The first thing that was awesome — those billions of calls and meetings and stuff? They’re actually useful here. Because in my previous company, it was a bit useless. It was just, you know, small talk. And the second thing — people here working in Ataccama, they actually do care about what they do, what the product would be, how it’s going to look.

Also the onboarding process is very nice because within the first couple of weeks, you’re basically meeting the hub of the company on those meetings. New people go through almost every manager, then they go to their Circle. So maybe for the first two weeks, you might see like 200 people from the company. And for me, it worked very well, because I started to feel comfortable here.

In my first week in the Czech Republic, I had a very weird feeling at first. Because it was the first time I came to the Czech Republic, and the first time I came to this office. I’d been working with these people for a half a year already. I knew what they looked like, I knew how to speak to them. But still, it was a different film. You come here and you see your team, they see you…I remember, those first days were really weird, because when you see people on Zoom, it’s one thing, but when you see them in natural HD…:) But still, after a few days, I felt really comfortable here because…it’s a simple thing, but people are nice here.

You joined right after the SpaceUp off-site, so you probably started when they were still setting up the Spaceports, Missions, etc. When you started, was that already going on?

Yes. But for our team, the ONE Portal team, as I understand everything was super different, because it started with just a small idea. When I was talking with the guys over beer, I understood that ONE Portal wasn’t a big deal from the beginning and there were no plans to make it something very important for the company like it is now. And when I came onboard, the first thing Dominik told me was that we are independent. We are part of the ICOPS Spaceport, but we are as a team — our feature, what we’re doing, we’re completely independent in everything.

We’re a very big team. For the whole first month, I couldn’t understand what we were doing. I had a design, I started to deliver things, but I still didn’t understand what it was supposed to be. As Dominik explained to me, it was supposed to be a super small thing, just a cool thing for the pre-sales team to actually give access to the potential customer to try out that kind of product for a 7- or 14-day trial. That’s it — we’re just connecting with Ataccama products and all we need is to make simple layouts so that people can click on things. And now it’s become much bigger than it was supposed to be, because the top management realized they can use it for much more than just trials. So again, it grew from a team of four people to a team of maybe 40.

And what do you personally like about the Spaceport setup?

Well, it was really complicated at the beginning to understand how everything works, because it seems simple at first sight. But when you go into the details, you realize, okay, I don’t quite understand how this should work, how that should work. I think the thing I like most about SpaceUP is the interactivity. When I started to understand things better, I remember thinking, Okay, it’s kind of a game that I have to understand, so I can play it better. Because there are rules, and I just need to learn them. And after that, it became much easier to actually follow the steps and the rules. It feels like its own methodology of how everything works here.

I wouldn’t say it’s like rebuilding an agile system — it has some comparisons to agile, of course, but it’s different. It’s a bit bigger than agile itself, because it’s not about how the project should be built. It’s about how the whole company is built. I don’t know if other methodologies have the same things.

For example, I really like the idea of the Ground Crew — if you have a problem, there’s a whole team who is going to react to it ASAP. And it’s very helpful that those people can manage any problem in just minutes or hours. It’s very cool. And this is a small thing too, but the whole of SpaceUP is about those small things, right? These are the ones that I really enjoyed. And I even like the terminology, the words that they use like Mission Landing, All Hands, etc., it really feels interactive. You understand it better and you feel it better.

And what about the Mission Observatories?

I’m not attending every Mission Observatory. But it’s actually a good thing. Every week you have a call when you can actually track what’s going on in the whole company, not only in your team or your Spaceport, but in general. We also have our own engineering observatory. The Circle system is, for me, something completely new. In my previous companies there was something like Circles, but it was probably the most useless thing I’d ever seen, because it was not helpful. It was only about one guy who just read some article about some new cool library or technology going “Hey, guys, this is a cool thing. Check it out.”

Here, people are really discussing things. And if there is, for example, some major update in technology that we are using, they dedicate a lot of time to actually explain and discuss new features, if we actually need to use new features, if we need to migrate to those new features, or if we can keep it old fashioned. That’s helpful. And that’s the thing that I said before about my first impression: Calls and meetings are actually useful here.

Want to join Timur and the ONE Portal team? Want to see for yourself how SpaceUP works? Join us!

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