Removing barriers to technology
By Mats ten Bohmer
Through the eyes of Mats ten Bohmer, Software Engineering Manager and iOS developer, we explore the evolutions of live-streaming democratising startup MyCujoo — providing technology to the long tail of football and sports — as it simultaneously creates a barrier-free software development environment for its tech teams.
“My name is Mats ten Bohmer, I am an iOS developer at MyCujoo. Primarily I am responsible for the MyCujoo player app that our fans use to watch livestreams and on-demand football content, and interact with the community.
I was attracted to work at MyCujoo for two main reasons — the technology stack that we are working with, and the product that we are developing. I am a football player myself; I love playing, not well unfortunately, but this is why I relate so much to the product we build: it is a wonderful thing for me as a player to be broadcasted, and to watch myself play and learn from it.
What keeps me even more interested and challenged on a day to day basis is evolving our structure and processes, in order to both deliver high quality products which contribute to profoundly change the sports media industry, and ensure a sustainable software development organisation at the same time.
Diversity and efficiency
When I joined, we were still working in functional tech teams so I was in the mobile department. We had a few mobile developers at the time, isolated, sitting at the same circle of desks. Since then we have moved on to a vastly different way of working. We have cross-functional product and tech teams, each of these teams focusing on a different area of our product.
Cross-functional means there aren’t only mobile developers in my team. Instead we have a diversity of profiles: a front end developer, a back end developer, a product owner, a designer. I think that is where the magic happens, since all of these people bring unique qualities, skills and perspectives to the table. At the same time, it represents a communication challenge, where we all need to tell each other what we want, what we need, and manage this. It is quite a mental shift from where we were.
Where it helps, is that we can just say “this is what we want to build, how do we do it, how fast can we release it”, without really having to care about or be limited by what other people or teams are doing.
It’s an interesting parallel, in order to help MyCujoo lowering the barriers to live streaming in the world of football, we have enabled our own teams here, at MyCujoo, to lower their own barriers in terms of software delivery — reducing as much as possible dependencies between various parts of the tech team.
Beyond cross-functional product & tech
Now, we are taking this further from a cross-functional set-up for product and tech, into something that is spanning the whole company, with all departments involved. We see how we were missing a marketing perspective, or a commercial, a business perspective in general. Hence the need for expanding cross-functional forums where business, product and tech come together and balance their inputs against each other’s needs.
One of the identified downsides that we all experienced within the tech team, with moving to a full cross-functional set-up, is that as soon as you do this, you lose a bit of touch with your specialist area, the mobile developers in my case.
Our solution to that has been the installation of what we call communities. Once every two weeks we come together as a mobile developers group and we share together, be it interesting new technologies or new solutions that we are thinking about in the mobile space. We try to keep this connection between us alive even if we do not work together day to day and do not share projects together.
Agile, cross-functional, and growth?
We are now creating a position of software engineering manager, who is responsible for managing the different cross-functional teams that we have. Not in terms of the product — that is still the responsibility of the product owner — but simply in terms of technological output. As we grow, our structure was simply not resilient enough. Combining the growth of the company, of the tech resources and delivery, and the move to this cross-functional environment, there is a certain level of guidance needed.
One of the ways to solve that is to have a very strong product owner who knows exactly what we want in the product. But as well on the technological side, you need someone to say “this is what we should pay attention to as well, in order for both our product and our technology to be strong”. This is one of the things I will be helping with as a software engineering manager at MyCujoo, as I am moving away from my role of iOS developer, which will mean a little less coding, and a little more managing.
Aspirations of a developer
What I care about in my career is that I can contribute to a product that I believe in. Whatever I can do to best contribute to that product, is what I will be doing. If that is programming and building an application then that is what I will be doing. But if I think that I can contribute more by managing a team or teams, to speed up the process of delivery, then that is something that I care about as well and that is what I will want to do.
Now I am coming into this new role as software engineering manager, but I love programming. I am not going into this managerial role because I feel like coding is beneath me. I simply feel like this is a place, right here, right now, where I can contribute more to what we are doing at MyCujoo. And coding is still something I really love to do, that will be part of my life. In 10 years, I don’t know what I will be doing, but there will definitely be some programming involved in it!”
