How I changed my career in Zeals

Introduction

Nice to meet you! I’m Goya, a PO at Zeals, and I’ve been with Zeals for two and a half years now, three years if you include my outsourcing period, so I’d like to take a look back at the challenges I’ve faced at Zeals. I’ve been a backend engineer, frontend engineer, Tech Recruiter, Project Manager, and Product Owner, so I hope this story will be helpful to others.

My name is Goya, and I was born and raised in Tokyo and I love music festivals and traveling. I’m looking forward to going to a festival with everyone when the pandemic is over!

About my career so far

Before joining Zeals

Before joining Zeals, I was a mentor at a programming school. My skills were mainly Ruby, AWS, and Javascript. I was scouted by a mentor at the school I was studying at. At the time, I wanted to be an engineer but I didn’t have enough time to study yet, but I also needed money, so I thought it would be a good opportunity to get paid while being exposed to programming.

As a result, I worked there for about nine months, and it was a great opportunity. It was a good opportunity for me to learn, because I thought that in order to teach others, I should understand as much as I could. It was also good for me to get into the habit of thinking about how much the other person understands. For example, when I talk to a new member, I make a habit of checking how much they know about the product while talking to them.

How I encountered Zeals

I was thinking about becoming an engineer when I was scouted by Zeals. Actually, when I went to the office for an interview, I was impressed by the company’s atmosphere. For example, unlike other companies, the team warmly greeted me while I was waiting for the interview, which was very refreshing.

I was also impressed by Kei-chan, the current CTO, who was 19 years old at the time and was leading the entire engineering team, which surprised me both about him and the organization. Actually, on the day I received the scouting notification, I was about to accept a job offer from another company, but then I received the notification. However, after being scouted, researching about Zeals, and reading Kei-chan’s article, I decided to change my plans and have an interview with Zeals. Kei-chan’s high school was one of the most prestigious schools in Japan, and while everyone around him was going on to top universities in Japan, I thought that the fact that Kei-chan joined Zeals must mean that Zeals had a lot to offer.

↑Photo from at the time

After joining Zeals (with some background changes in the organizational side of Zeals)

My time as a backend engineer
In November of 2018, I first became involved with Zeals as an outsourced engineer. At that time, I was involved as a backend engineer writing with Ruby and Ruby on Rails, which I had studied up until then, for about six months.
I was mainly involved in the development of the admission panel used by members of the company, but I was also involved in several new development projects, including the first project in the market to develop an in-chat payment system using LINE Pay.
At the time, I was still working as an outsourced contractor, but as I participated in Zeals’ events, I came to realize that I wanted to work hard as a full-time employee, and in April 2019, I became a full-time employee.

Time as a Front-end Engineer
At the same time, the front-end engineer quit, I also wanted to write Javascript, so I volunteered to join the front-end team.
The first thing I was involved in was the modification of the management screen for push delivery settings, which could be called the core of Zeals’ chatbot system.
At that time, the company was in a period of expansion and the number of communication designers using the admission panel was increasing. The delivery date was one month, which was a very tight schedule, especially for me as a front-end beginner, but I was able to finish the project successfully.
Right after the release, I remember Kei-chan, the current CTO, praised me. I think that was probably the only moment when I was praised by Kei-chan. The project was so difficult that I had a fever the day after the release, but I think I grew a lot from it.
After that, I became more involved in front-end operations.

Tech Recruiter
It was also at this time that I became involved in hiring development staff.
The person in charge of recruiting at the time had changed jobs, and the CTO was busy with a huge project, so I took charge of hiring.
I was involved in the hiring process for about 9 months, and I learned a lot from this experience.
I was able to talk about both back-end and front-end technologies based on my own experiences, so I was able to learn about various technologies, and I was able to think about my career by talking to various job seekers.

PM Period
After that, I worked as a unit leader while doing front-end development, but as the development organization started to expand more, there were not enough PMs in the team and the team also needed a PM with development knowledge, so I became a PM in September 2020. As the number of talented engineers in the team was increasing, I thought I could add more value to the company as a PM than as a developer.
Another reason was that I had been an engineer and PM at Zeals up until then, and I thought I might be good as a PM, so I wanted to work as hard as I could in this position.
However, it was very challenging at first. I couldn’t figure out how to get the project going. Also, as the company grew, we started to take on new kinds of projects that we had never done before. For example, the acquisition of a privacy policy. It was very challenging to coordinate not only with the business and the engineers, but now the legal aspects would need to be considered as well.
Looking back now, this PM period was the hardest year for me since I had joined Zeals. It would be my fault if projects did not progress, and while it was hard to gather the opinions of each stakeholder, I was always worried and checked the specifications many times because I did not know if I was taking the right development approach for the development requirements. When I was an engineer and faced difficult issues, tech leads or other senior programmers always helped me with pair programming and other things, no one could help me with the projects I was working on when I was a PM, so I had to overcome all difficulties by myself.
Even so, I was able to overcome these problems thanks to the support of those around me, such as my senior PM who was very busy and still had 1-on-1 meetings with me every day. It was great to know what each stakeholder in the company was thinking about with these kinds of projects.

PO Period

After working as a PM for more than a year, I became a PO in October 2021.

My work as PO has just started, so I still have a long way to go, but the biggest difference I feel now is that I need to gather information and think about what I can do independently, such as thinking about the roadmap of the product, instead of doing what was assigned from the top.

Looking back on my career

One of the reasons I joined Zeals in the first place was to be involved in various positions. I was still young and didn’t know what I wanted to do, so I wanted to figure this out.
So I never said no to any of the new position opportuntiies that came my way.
As a result, I was able to be involved in many different things, which I think is a good thing.

What do I think about Zeals after working there for 3 years:

I think that Zeals is an environment that gives me a lot of freedom and responsibility, where I can make my own decisions about my work, and where overseas members can work remotely from overseas despite the time difference.
I’ve never seen an environment like this in any other company, so I can’t imagine wanting to take on challenges in any other company.

Also, when I first joined the company, the CEO had envisioned the state of Zeals in three years, and now that three years have passed, we are on the right track, so I want to help in fully achieving the goals that were set. It’s interesting to be able to work in a growing company.

Conclusion

Looking back, I realized that I have done a lot. To be honest, I can’t believe it’s my career.
I think that being involved in so many different positions has given me a better perspective than when I was only an engineer.
The first thing I want to do now is to do more of what I am currently doing at Zeals, such as being a product owner and customer support. I also want to use my project management skills and technical knowledge to do something else.

Thank you very much for reading this far. Finally, Zeals is hiring people to work with us.
Zeals is a great environment with many engineers who have high technical skills and good communication skills. We are waiting for applications from people who want to achieve the hospitality revolution together with us.
https://jp.linkedin.com/company/zeals-co-ltd