8 Best Moments of OutSystems Engineering in 2020
Let’s be honest: a year ago, we didn’t think 2020 would turn out like this. It has been a year that’s challenged us greatly. From the global pandemic that pretty much affected us all to adapting to new ways of working or different routines, 2020 was a test of our resiliency.
Our Engineering team grew by leaps and bounds this year. We welcomed a new CTO and became more and more distributed as an organization. OutSystems launched a campaign to support those affected by Covid-19, in which a lot of us participated.
Read these eight testimonials from those who make it happen (and worth it).
In May, I joined OutSystems a few months into the pandemic, and I thought it would be slow-paced because of being remote. Boy, was I wrong! The pace and frequency of changes are different, and you can be sure of one thing: you’ll never get bored. We are challenged every day, and in my case, a lot of it came down to shortening my onboarding and quickly becoming busier. It could have been a bad thing, but it was actually great! Managing teams and their challenges is interesting, and the culture and mindset help us feel integrated and onboard the OutSystems Way. I am looking forward to seeing what 2021 will bring us, as I can’t complain (much) about 2020, besides being the craziest year.
Working in OutSystems Engineering for three years, I found a fantastic team, passionate about the product and expert in many domains: Product Management, User Experience, Quality, or DevOps. Here, you have the opportunity to learn with the best, and you do learn every single day.
While working in Engineering Operations, I had the chance to help lead the new quarterly planning process, in which the entire team dedicated one week to align the product vision to each team’s backlog. It was a powerful exercise and an important moment of connection, working as one, particularly when remotely leading almost 400 people.
I can say that it was a huge challenge that took us all out of our comfort zone, but I genuinely believe that this is where you can find growth, success, and ultimately, happiness.
As we all know, 2020 has been an atypical year, but I’m proud to say that OutSystems has had our back the whole time by providing all the support needed to go through this phase, showing empathy, and working relentlessly to make us feel safe!
This has been a great professional year for me. In the first half of 2020, I’ve worked with my team on taking Workflow Builder to General Availability. This super exciting tool allows business users to create business process apps without using any code. Check it out here.
In the other half, I’ve had the privilege to step up into a team lead role, where I inherited a great team with whom it is a privilege to work every day. There are significant challenges, a lot to learn, and that’s what makes it so appealing. By the way, we are hiring!
I’ve been at OutSystems for about three months, and it has been the smoothest of processes. The interviews and the actual onboarding were a refreshing change from other places I have worked at before. Here, I found a company that adapts very quickly and efficiently to change, as long as the purpose is clear. There’s no drama.
I joined as an individual contributor. Within weeks, we realized I could help unify the Architecture team, so I moved onto a leadership role. It was an incredibly seamless transition. At OutSystems, people are just focused on the customers and not so much on politics, and the group took on this new structure very quickly.
I joined OutSystems in July and had the chance to work on a few different challenges! At first, I worked with a team exploring new monitoring and observability tools, which enable new ways of looking at our data, helping troubleshoot issues, and detecting problems before our users report them. I am now working with development teams to assess their quality needs and adopt new practices and tools.
I am impressed with our team’s knowledge and experience, and have been learning so much with each interaction! 2020 was a challenging year (to put it mildly), and looking back at what we accomplished makes me excited for what’s to come. I’m happy to be a part of this amazing team 🙂
Before I joined OutSystems in October, I couldn’t decide if 2020 was a year moving at a snail’s pace or if I was the snail and the year was moving at lightning speed past me.
After my first day at OutSystems, I knew it was damn well time for me to lace up my running shoes and get going — every day is filled with learning, meeting OutSystemers, challenges, understanding our product, growth, and moving fast.
The world changed around all of us this year — before even factoring in growing our R&D team, building new teams, with a new CTO and in new locations — so adaptation, agility and empathy have been key drivers in my first few months at OutSystems. With the incredible leadership, drive, helpfulness, and passion the R&D team exudes, coupled with our product’s future, I can’t wait to start a whole new marathon in 2021 with this team and company!
Oh yeah, and if you want to put on your running shoes too, we’re hiring!
As a UX researcher, I feel that 2020 was the year in which teamwork changed radically!
When I started working at OutSystems, people used to proudly say that one day here is the equivalent to one month elsewhere, and now I get it and feel the same way because I’ve learned so much about so many things in such a short time.
As UX researchers, connecting in person and using writable walls was essential to get the full picture, correlate matters, and reason with team members. However, with the fully remote scenario in 2020, the way we work with the teams changed radically. Now, we collaborate online using digital boards and video calls. Throughout the year, we became experts in remote collaboration tools, and we improved our long-distance research skills by connecting with users using solely digital methods.
As I am a “people person” so not being able to connect in person with teammates and users was quite challenging, but looking back, I see that I have learned so much! Our team quickly and thoroughly adapted to this new way of doing user research while almost doubling our team size. A lot more people joined the Engineering team, and I’m so grateful to work with such a variety of colleagues who come from incredibly different backgrounds.
This year, I worked for more extended periods with different teams. The best moment of 2020 was realizing that no matter the research initiative or the number of groups I work with, there is always something new to learn and astonishing discoveries while performing research at OutSystems.
I began my journey at Outsystems this year, and even though little time has passed, lots of exciting changes have happened.
We have bootstrapped initiatives to sharpen our development tools, speed up our development processes, and workflows. We are gaining immense momentum. The need to have a solid infrastructure has fueled actions targeted at scalability and maintainatibility — two things that will ensure that the OutSystems rocket will go very, very far.
Even though I have joined an already well-structured, large company, I feel that the energy here could be compared to that of a startup, and every day is an exciting moment to think fresh and change what’s needed.
I felt that the responsibility I’ve taken up for the company made an impact, much due to people’s flexibility (especially my manager). I’m excited to be joining yet another initiative for OutSystems to gain visibility by writing blog posts and doing internal talks to boost knowledge sharing. I’m positively overwhelmed by the possibilities and can’t wait for what’s coming next year!
In the year where the world was under a lot of stress, we persevered. And although we know that 2021 won’t be any easier, we remain positive and optimistic because we have our global OutSystems family to rely on at the end of the day.
Now you: do you have a 2020 best moment to share with us?
