Going International & Mastering Product Agility

A second migration, this time to another country, Uruguay. In here I met a wonderful team of kind and smart people, Rootstrap.

Senior Developer & Tech Lead Roles

I'd highlight two projects that represented several challenges, both technically and organization wise, and that ended up being wonderful learning experiences.

1. Givetide:

Givetide was backend-heavy, I had to integrate with several API's given the business model: the product relied on rounding up users' bank transactions, transferring donations to charity agencies, connecting to database of available charities, and a few other structural intricacies in-between. It was a great experience, this time powered by Ruby on Rails, PostgreSQL, redis, and Swift for iOS.

2. Rigz:

The first challenge with Rigz was the complexity of the product: They served as intermediary providers for Amazon's deliveries networks. The second biggest challenge was the effort in refactoring, creating a strategy to update a really large codebase, fully active with millions of users and daily transactions. I successfully helped the team create a plan for this transition, and implemented the first modules of the new version.

Product Manager

With Rootstrap I had the most stable working environmnent so far (about five years), and I was able to dive into other areas I hadn't explored before. The Product Owner and eventually Product Manager years were very valuable, I learned the subtleties of negotiating with clients and different stakeholders, interacting between disciplines and being able to align plans and expectations, while remaining aware of the businesses ambitions and realities.

There were a few projects in which I was dedicated to this role during the duration of several release cycles, but beyond that, I served as the technical leader of a separate process within the agency that gave me the opportunity to work with many different products in a relatively short period of time. It was called discovery

Discovery Process

In the discovery process I defined, alongside designer and business leaders, the scope of a project, the roadmap towards the next versions of a product, if it was an MVP then we decided how to prioritize the work to maximize value with the major features of the product. If there were particular technical risk that required research and prototyping, I worked in identifying those areas that would take extraordinary work, and according to the conditions I would do some of the initial exploratory implementation to assess feasibility and estimate further efforts.

It was an extremely prolific period, and honestly I lost count of how many products we helped give birth during this process, but they all sit somewhere in my head, and the accumulated learnings I gratefuly keep and recall when needed :)

But a big change was slowly brewing during those five years, and we've arrived at the sabbatical period.