Our Senior Dev Matthias has been our new Head of Development (HoD) since April. But what does a HoD actually do? And what plans does Matthias have for Raidboxes product development and our technical team? He has answered these and other questions for you.
How long have you been with Raidboxes and what was your previous role?
I've been here since July 2017 and was employed as a Senior Full-Stack Developer.
I also managed the second-level support for quite some time and actively took care of the happy management, i.e. laser tag and more.
You are now Head of Development & Product Manager - what is behind these roles?
As Head of Development, I manage the technical development of our product and make fundamental technical decisions together with the management. I provide answers to the questions: Where is the journey going and how do we get there?
As a Product Manager, I bring clear structure and better project management to product development across all departments. Here I provide answers to the questions: Where are we and when will we be there?
So you like to use metaphors?
I love comparisons and symbols. I always try to explain structures to everyone in as simple a way as possible. This also helps me enormously to get the team on the same level of understanding. Communication deficits are often a major stress and planning factor. If you can eliminate this by reducing issues to a common structure that everyone understands, it helps enormously.
Why do you think both positions should be filled?
I am an advocate that in a company releasing a purely technical product, someone with knowledge of the internal technical processes of the product should be responsible for planning the features and progress in development.
The fact that a single person holds the combination of these roles helps immensely in the development of projects and also minimizes the effort involved in project planning. There is no need for information to be communicated between technology, project managers and management in order to clarify processes. Instead, projects can be planned and implemented directly from the technical side and then simply reported.
In future, reporting will also be automated, as progress will be entered directly into a digital scoreboard so that every team member can see the progress of a project at any time. This means that sprints/projects can be planned and executed much more efficiently.
Did your parents ask you what you actually do for a living now?
Ehm, so the only question I often hear is something like: "You, I'm having problems with my laptop, can you help me?"
Do you always come to the office in a suit now?
Clothes don't mean anything until someone lives in them. I don't think clothes make the man. If I don't have to constantly worry about how I look in order to have an impact on others, I can make time for important things. The support and confidence the whole team gives me shows me that no one is paying attention to all the holes in my pants. 😉
Which project will you tackle first? Or are there any new things you are introducing to Raidboxes?
"Introduce new" might be too much to say. Rather, I optimize existing processes and set new directions. For example, I am activating existing potential through better project management. Among other things, I want to give the technical team the opportunity to develop individual skills even better and at the same time take the pressure off development. And without reducing the speed.
I also want to reduce idle times, where you have to wait for other team members before you can continue working on your own task, to an absolute minimum. We can improve release times through agile yet precise project and event management tailored to our needs. And we can do this without sacrificing the flexibility that holacracy offers us.
In the near future, we will also be able to move away from a "hair-pulling start-up mentality" towards a streamlined company. This is not only easy on the nerves, but also avoids wasted working time and miscommunication. It also improves the "mental health" factor of the team, which is very important to me.
And externally, what new features can Raidboxes customers look forward to in the future?
I'm not the type to promise technical features at specific times and I tend to keep a low profile when it comes to our plans. What I can talk about, however, is the current situation: in the first part of 2019, we focused on addressing things from our feedback forum - in other words, the direct implementation of user requests.
In the course of this, we recently mailboxes as well as a number of optimizations to our dashboard (list view, domain management, BOX settings, etc.), which we made based on user feedback. There are now two major and highly requested features that we are currently working on.
Then the development process will initially focus on power users. I want to make Raidboxes more at home for the console junkies and workflow nerds.
What do you do when you're not sitting in front of your (4!) screens in the office?
Sitting at home in front of my 4 screens 😉 I'm quite active in various hackerspaces and the WordPress community as well as my private projects.
For me, screen-free activities mainly involve sport and music. I train for extreme runs every day and go wakeboarding and kitesurfing as often as I can. It's the best way for me to switch off. And this also justifies my high food consumption.
