Better
Front-End Lead & Software Development ManagerJuly 2019 — July 2023
Betterspace is a platform founded to give employees the freedom in choosing the best way to look after their mental wellbeing at work.
Growth & Automation
When I joined Betterspace, there was only one ReactJS website for employees and admins.
Employee's orders were “processed” by manually buying the products from Amazon.
Finances were reconciled and paid by hand.
In order to scale, there was a great need for automation.
After a month of acclimatising, and with under two months worth of React experience, I took on the challenge of learning React Native to build the Android and iOS apps for employees.
I had an instrumental role in helping Betterspace to scale up:
- From 1 to 5 end-user platforms serving different stakeholders
- Move from deploying straight to production to a structured release process with 4 environments
- From 3 to 20+ clients including Accenture, Stewarts Law, Linklaters and Wikimedia
- To over 20,000 users
I worked closely with the FE and BE developers to integrate Stripe to handle finances, Shopify to integrate with our fulfilment suppliers, and SSO to automate the whitelisting and sign up processes.
I was promoted to a lead role which involved managing the tech team, crafting the software architecture, influencing the product, and developing processes to ensure my team had a good developer experience.
Roles & Responsibilities
Software Developer
- ⚛️ React JS
- 📱 React Native
- 🤝 Leadership responsibilities
- 👨🏫 Mentoring junior devs
- ✏️ UI/UX
Lead Front-End Developer
- 👥 Team management
- ⚙️ DevOps
- 🤖 E2E testing framework
- 📣 Internal and external demos
- 🦾 Accessibility advocate
- ✏️ UI/UX
FE Lead & Software Dev Manager
- 👥 Team management
- 📝 Project management
- 📐 Product team
- 💼 Recruitment
- ⚙️ DevOps
- ✏️ UI/UX
Achievements
Being in a start-up of <25 employees, I had the opportunity to contribute to many areas of the business.
👥 Team Management
In my lead and manager roles, I was responsible for hiring new talent, mentoring existing team members, running daily standups and resolving conflicts.
🦾 Accessibility
We conducted an accessibility audit of our web platform. Advised by accessibleweb.com, I single-handedly worked to achieve conformance to the WCAG 2.1 AA standards.
✏️ Design / UX
Having a keen eye for detail, a background in psychology and an ability to modify existing designs, I often found myself producing designs in Figma for upcoming features.
📈 Scaling
I was instrumental in refining the MVP into a polished product with over 20,000 users from over 20 clients. I scaled the product from 1 to 5 end-user platforms serving different stakeholders and developed the tech and management processes to facilitate scaling efficiently.
⚙️ DevOps
I introduced a standardised Git workflow to enable smoother collaboration and a release management process with environments (dev, stg, prd), QA and release. I also took on a project management role; planning sprints using tools like Jira and Trello, managing releases and facilitating communication between technical and non-technical teams.
📝 Strategy
I worked closely with the product owners, tech leads and developers to ensure the product and technology was developed efficiently. A key focus was on software architecture – ensuring that the product was scalable, reliable and secure. Examples included API standardisation, API change management, migration, refactoring and code reuse.
Credit Where Credit's Due
As the second member of the tech team, I was heavily involved with all the work shown above. However, I'd like to commend the collaborative effort of the various members of the tech team over the years: Adrien, Alfredo, Arild, Ehsan, Eugene, Fatjon, Ivan, Jack, Jurgen, Kiran, Kostia, Kumar, Rahim, Rami, Sarra, Suri, Tony, Vitalii, Xhulio, Zach and all my non-tech Betterspace colleagues.