A Unique Work Culture That Enables Our Software Engineers to Grow

By Mohamed Adel

iPrice is Southeast Asia’s leading e-commerce aggregator, and today, we are set to become the region’s best online shopping companion by providing consumers the best deals across the e-commerce market.

To achieve this, our company believes that each and every individual in the organisation plays a vital role. Therefore, we, software engineers in iPrice, have adapted a unique working style that proves to be effective for both our organisation’s success and our individual growth. What I love most about it is that our structure is very collaborative and innovative in nature. In fact, our managers take a bottom-up approach.

So, I’d like to share a few tricks that have been working for our tech team:

Ownership

Part of iPrice’s work culture is valuing ownership, which entails that employees of any rank (no matter what level) have complete reign over the work they produce. This way, software engineers in iPrice have more focus on executing high-quality and maintainable code. Not only does this improve output, but it also contributes to each engineer’s growth and skillset.

Likewise, everyone is involved in the decision-making process because every opinion and expertise are equally valued. As a result, this solidifies commitment in what we do.

Nonetheless, this doesn’t mean that it’s every man for himself. In iPrice, teamwork is equally as important. Ownership just means that each person is encouraged to take initiative, voice out their ideas, and propose solutions to challenges. Here, we work in teams, and together, we achieve specific goals and release features on a biweekly basis, whereas working in isolation may sometimes lead to individuals chasing personal agendas.

iPrice doesn’t really take a top-down approach; high-level managers encourage each software engineer to test their own solutions and tools. Our work environment encourages personal growth as much as the organization’s growth itself.

Product and Tech Refinements through Grooming Sessions

iPrice uses the AGILE SCRUM framework, which is a set of practices intended to deliver the best value to our customers and stakeholders. It improves effectiveness through collaborations within and among teams to solve complex problems.

The engineering teams in iPrice hold recurring grooming sessions, which is somewhat like a symposium. The Project Managers or Product Owners present the next target tasks to the table, then everyone freely discusses, asks questions, and determines the outcomes of achieving each goal. This way, engineers don’t only think of technical solutions but gain more understanding of user impact and product vision.

During these sessions, we try to minimise the complicated challenges that engineers may face while implementing the actual work. This in return gives everybody the confidence to work on the backlog of tasks while providing transparency on how and why we’re doing this.

We, engineers, also hold our own technical sessions after gathering product requirements from the grooming sessions. Here, we tackle each pain point more closely. As always, each member is encouraged to freely express their opinions and ideas. We often see how open-minded and experimental the team can get when we come up with different proposed solutions and new efficient methods.

An Architecture Board

Contrary to what some may believe, software development is NOT just about coding. We believe it’s so much more than that. This is why we have decided to have an Architecture board led by our Software Architect. This board consists of senior engineers, each recognised for their excellent technical knowledge and skills. They collaborate through regular and intensive discussions, in which they are to achieve the following:

• Align architectural decisions across all value streams/departments.
• Avoid technical debts.
• Avoid rework due to incorrect/improper architectural design.

This initiative allows important architectural decisions to be made for all our products and services maintained by the Tech Department.

A good architectural design saves us a lot of trouble; it provides a good quality of code and system design. Moreover, it makes onboarding new engineers easier by giving a clear understanding of the product.

“A solid architecture with a calculated Technical Department is key for our success in building a solutions platform,” our CTO Heinrich Wendel would often remark.

Career Development (Honing Competencies)

Our software engineers design, run, and improve software that meets user needs. We are responsible for writing clean, scalable, extensible, and secure code with a test-driven approach. We create code that is open by default and easy for others to reuse.

Every quarter, software engineers have one-on-one meetings with their managers to discuss and improve their core competencies. During these meetings, the manager suggests ways to improve the engineers’ skills and talk about their career growth.

Knowledge-Sharing and Guidance

In our company, it’s not a rare sight to see a bunch of developers exchanging ideas. Pair programming is not unusual, especially when implementing new features or fixing production bugs before our users encounter them. It speeds up development and adapting to tools.

iPrice’s management aims to strike a balance between micromanagement and a completely hands-off approach. While we practice ownership, it’s also common for seasoned engineers to mentor the junior staff. Senior engineers really allocate time to guide the juniors through the platform and to address any concerns.

Cross-Functioning Teams

In iPrice, the Tech Department not only consists of Software Engineers, but it also includes QA Engineers, Product Managers, Scrum Masters, UX Designers, and Business Intelligence Analysts. Each member belongs to their own functional team as well as the cross-functional team.

Cross-functioning teams are very beneficial for us as it constantly provides a top-notch personalised experience for our customers. Moreover, this speeds up innovation and creativity among teams while improving the coordination across the higher functional areas.

A certain team doesn’t necessarily have to work on their area of codebase alone. iPrice has multiple tech teams, and through the cross-functional system we have in place, other teams may aid with any blockers a certain team faces. Thus, it’s very important for us to have symposium-like sessions as they provide an opportunity for everyone to share knowledge and introduce new features and tools.

Not only does this structure benefit customers by empowering our team to build high-quality products and a neat user experience, but it also boosts teamwork and consistency across the company. Shared decision-making is achieved by regular team meetings and constant communication. These are just some evident ways in which iPrice promotes a work culture of collaboration and knowledge-sharing.