Buddy-System for Developers
Team flexibility & P2P training at Yad2 in TelAviv
Yad2 is one of Israel’s classifieds portal. As a part of the Axel Springer Group, it’s also a member of the Global Axel Springer Developer Community.
“I’m bored” Anna told her boss, Mati — straight up. No sugarcoating, no polite ways to make it less blunt, just a truth she was so honest with herself about, it seemed to be absolutely no problem to her to admit that to her team-lead as well.
I was shocked. But to Mati it was great that she was being so direct:
“Either she gets help with the boredom, or she leaves — so it’s good that she told me”. Alright that’s actually pretty smart. Still shockingly honest from what I’m used to.
And then the solution: They made a deal that Anna trained somebody else for 2 months to do her job, and then she could leave to do another project. Just like that.
Welcome to the Yad2 buddy system!
TelAviv seems to make for interesting biographies. While Mati and Anna both come from completely different backgrounds, today they’re one team working at Yad2 — Israel’s best place online to find good deals on electronics, cars, insurances, and most importantly: Apartments & houses.
Anna actually grew up in Russia where earned a Masters degree in Political Science and worked as a market researcher, before moving to Israel and working at Yad2 after completing a 3 month / 10 hour per day coding bootcamp.
Mati grew up in Israel, where he was a commander during the mandatory military service, founded and sold a company after college, and eventually started at Yad2, where is now the team-lead of one of the biggest teams — the real-estate team.
cp Anna/MapboxSkills TwoOther/Developers
When Anna approached Mati about wanting to jump into new adventures one of the biggest hurdles was that Anna was the internal “map wizard”, having built their Vue based frontend around the Mapbox API.
Anna had a great idea about improving an aspect of the backend to better perform when queried by the UI. But before she could switch into the backend team for a while, acting more in a role of an architect, she first had to find a replacement. She was more or less the only person with in-depth knowledge about the implementation of the Maps in the frontend.
Three months ago, maps on Mobile were supposed to be launched as a feature — and the choice about who would implement it, could have been easy: Just give it to the person who already knows how to do this stuff — Anna. Instead, the buddy system of Mati’s team kicked in, and two other developers were trained by Anna instead.
“When you’re doing new things, you usually take 3x as long — in this case we actually delivered 10 days early” (Anna)
Usually you would think that putting new people in charge will cause you to miss all sorts of deadlines — in this case however it actually made them deliver 10 days ahead of schedule.
A tough place to be flexible in — theoretically
For Mati the buddy system is essential. And that’s a little surprising to hear, because his job doesn’t exactly sound stress-free as is: Their team helps build the tools for the real-estate division which makes up 2/3 of the company’s revenues. Their requirements and timetables are very sales-driven, with a lot of pressure to deliver & perform — usually not the kind of place to be flexible in.
“The ability to reshuffle the team is much more agile”, Mati points out though. His developers will come to him and “want something else” as he puts it — and with the buddy system he can provide that flexibility.
On top of that, the team grew recently — with a lot of new Junior developers coming in. This can be a breaking point for some companies. Training juniors is hard work and takes a special kind of people. But if the whole organization routinely trains people on new skills & technologies, training junior developers is something everybody’s used to.
As a wise colleague of mine once said:
Everybody’s a junior developer in something.
Being a successful mentor
So how do you become a successful mentor when teaching others your skills?
#1 It starts with the team lead: Yes, training takes more time initially, and yet Yad2 was able to deliver 10 days ahead of schedule. Why? Because they put 2 developers into training, not just one. The initial slowdown was both expected and encouraged. There was a clear understanding of the benefits.
If that’s not the case with your team-lead, the model will break down.
#2 Driver seat from Day 1: Another success factor is putting your trainees into the driver seat from day 1. Learning-by-Doing in its simplest form. Let the person doing the learning also do the coding. They will learn a lot faster when they’re responsible for delivering, not just forced to sit back and listen for hours.
#3 Mentee needs to be interested: This so obvious, it has to be mentioned so nobody forgets to think about this. There’s no point in teaching someone who’s not interested. For this system to work, the trainee really has to be interested in what you’re teaching them.
#4 Be ready to help at any time: Anna admits, it has been “kind of hard to make time” for her trainees sometimes. But that’s what it takes to successfully train someone new. Be ready to jump in and help at any time. And keep in mind proper training will take a few months to complete. Only when you put in the work, can you expect great results.
Lastly it might be worth pointing out that Mati of course did not invent this system. He says it’s actually pretty common in the Israeli tech scence.
It’s still very impressive to see how well the team(s) at Yad2 have used such a peer-to-peer system to train old and new developers for new skills & technologies.
If you want to implement this system at your team as well, feel free to connect to the two 👇🏻
Mati on LinkedIn
Anna on LinkedIn
💼 Curious about working at Yad2?
👉🏻 Check out our open positions
— — —
Hi, I’m Jonas and I’m currently building up a Global Axel Springer Developer Community. Subscribe to our Weekly Tech Newsletter to get a fresh story like this every Monday and to receive details on how you can join our global developer community ✌🏻
Want me to help tell your story? Reach out to me 👇🏻
🚀 Subscribe to the Weekly Tech Newsletter
