Dream team
Hello! My name is Sasha and I am the Head of operations at Eulerr.com.
I am a political scientist, I have completed a bachelor’s degree in QMUL, but I always had an interest in IT, working in IT companies, I noticed that some of my friends began to set up their own start-ups, so when I was invited to participate, I decided to grab luck by the tail. I would like to talk about how Eulerr.com project team was formed and also to use the opportunity to introduce our team to you.
Eulerr.com founder and at the same time CEO, Denis, at some point in his career decided to change the future of hiring in the IT industry and give the world a new service. He had everything: a strong ideological base, a vision, not very clear positioning and even a budget. And here is Denis by the way
Obviously, the matter remained for small — to put together a multifunctional team that could “make a fairy tale happen”. The story is not about how to find the best specialists iin the field, but about how gross mistakes could be made in the selection and organization of the team’s work.
Here it is worth to introduce Damir, who became our team and teach leader, and also CTO:
Damir while working for Yandex has obtained amazing experience in softwaredevelopment. He met Denis for the first time through mutual acquaintances, but they did not communicate at first.
Then he heard about Eulerr and it went on.
We also have Nikita, who is responsible for the front-end and indeed for what the User sees. Nikita is busy on the project from the very first days.
It is important to note here that Nikita is a contractor, which generates its pros and cons regarding motivation when the qualification leaves no doubts.
Any developer on the project (notice: this applies to other professionals involved in the project realization) is determined by two parameters: qualification and motivation.
Combinations can be different. I’ll give an example, and you’ll think for yourself which is the most resembling type and looks like the members of your project team:
- High qualification, high motivation: an employee, always knows and understands what he is doing. Works much more than others, because he has an interest.
- High qualification, motivation is lower than permissible: everything is able, but does not want anything. On the shoulder to solve urgent tasks, but it does all the typing and requires more control.
- Unmotivated neophyte: an employee who thinks only about the salary and how to work less, but get it.
- No qualification, but a high level of motivation: most often yesterday’s graduate with a profile education, terribly energetic, learns new and learns, but at the expense of the employer. Allows gaffes, some of which are visible immediately, and some are revealed later.
About the qualification at Eulerr
We believe that the developer’s qualification contains three main components:
- Experience — knowledge and ability to act according to the situation, based on own already committed mistakes or mistakes commited by someonelse. Experience is of exceptional value, because it makes it possible to avoid mistakes on the way to the goal.
- Hard skills — knowledge of tools, as well as the ability to effectively use them.
- Soft skills — above all the ability to effectively build interaction with other team memebers, and even the culture of work.
Of course there are always compromises and it is worth sacrificing the first for a confident second and third for the excellent first, but we try to find a balance. Although, no, we do not try. A startup works only when all three components are equally well developed.
About motivation at Eulerr
With motivation, the situation is somewhat more complicated. Motivation has some basic level, which in the case of a startup is determined by whether a member of the team believes in the product they are working on, whether he sees prospects, whether he feels that everything is going according to plan. Often a decent quality of development can be achieved by maintaining a decent level of motivation.
We decided to do this:
- On all fronts only people with sufficient qualifications should be involved;
- To provide them with a high base motivation;
- Every day to monitor the current motivation.
Involvement at Eulerr as a product
The team must be involved 100%. All of them! And not only developers or inspirers. After all, in our team there is Ilya, who deals with the administration of development teams and content and who, if not he, should be aware of absolutely everything, be confident in the direction of the next step? But by the way, Ilya by himself
We always start working with the new team member with an explanation of the product’s prospects, with a story about how the idea, vision was thought out. Our goal was for the team to work in the mode of “self-realization”, we tried to sell our product to it, because nobody is enthusiastically interested in it. Frankly, I belived in it more than others. After all, I have experienced many years pain at production, which Eulerr is called upon to solve. We try to keep the value, significance, success and prospects of the product, its successes and failures in sight. The team must see progress, success and failures to associate themselves with the product.
About money
We believe that it is important that the team feels comfortable, because hire only experienced professionals. Initially, it was decided that the project should be interesting to work with. After all, we understand the value of employees, they are our key asset, we want and are willing to pay enough to our employees (this is important for maintaining the “mode of self-realization”) and at the same time we really expect that they will work accordingly. Here, of course, it is important to note that at Eulerr we are not willing to pay less to employees who work worse — we can not afford such employees.
For us, only one approach is acceptable: to play openly: to denote the conditions for all positions, the number of these positions, for how many months the budget will suffice, and how it is planned to earn (earn or invest) money. This removes unnecessary questions.
Collective responsibility
The issue of responsibility is the key one in software development, especially if it is a start-up.
The difficulty lies in the fact that the project involves not only us, as the team that implements the product, but also the teams that we offer customers, for which, in turn, we are responsible. Here an important role is played by Natalya, who is responsible for attracting teams and contractual relations with them. Please, meet Natalya
The developer within the teams will never be forced to make a bad product and sweep up the problems under the carpet because of the Client’s of PM’s pressure. We after all specially recruit people for whom it would be physically unpleasant to make a bad product. Thus, we share with them a burden of responsibility, always behave openly with terms and estimates, so that later we do not have problems with motivation primarily of Eulerr.com employees.
Our expectations and reality
Frustration is what we feel. In other words, it is the gap between expectations and reality. At some point, the accumulation of frustration led to a sudden drop, and then the productivity of team members only increased in a different direction. Therefore, we believe that it is very important to monitor the size of the gap between expectations and reality.
Conclusion
We have set a high standard initially, we work only with experienced specialists who can work in a team of equal professionals. Denis knows exactly his financial and time capabilities. We sold the product to each member of the team, provided good conditions, gave the team the opportunity to consider the product to be shareable. We realized that responsibility is not a certificate, it is not given away, but taken with our own hands. We follow expectations and reality. The main conclusion is that now our team is a very valuable asset, which is no less important and no less fragile than the interest of investors.
So far the project is developing, we hope that in the future it will be only better.
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