My official role, Regional Director & Co-Founder, needs me to get lots of tasks done every day. These are the different ‘hats’ I need to wear every day at Aycron.
The manager hat.
I can meet with clients and understand what they need. I can set aside differences and ‘get it.’ This is challenging but not impossible. It takes a lot of listening and trying to understand our clients’ businesses and their current problems. Once that happens, and only then, I can propose improvements to their business.
I can explain what we need to engineer to our team leads. We can all agree on the estimation, the timeline and the feature set. Sometimes it’s easy, but most of the time it takes time to communicate and to set the goals for the projects.
I’m still learning how to manage projects and teams. I admit it is one of the hardest parts of my job.
The technical hat.
I had to learn Ruby on Rails. It wasn’t that complicated. After many years programming in C, Smalltalk, Javascript, Python and mostly Java/Java EE; it’s easy to learn a new language and to understand the patterns implemented in Rails.
I strongly believe that Rails is the right tool for the right problem, when it comes to building web applications. We have worked in several projects, which involved content management systems, e-commerce applications and social media content aggregators. I’m very happy with the outcome of our technical choice.
I will still consider Java, .NET or Microsoft Sharepoint for solving other problems. But for simple web applications, I think Rails is perfect. I can usually understand technical problems and find the right person to solve it. Sometimes that person is me.
The administrative hat.
Every week I have to keep track of our prospective clients, projects, deadlines and teams. For this, I use a combination of Excel sheets, our intranet at Aycron and Highrise. I had to move away from the paper-based administrative organization once the amount of projects in parallel increased.
I realize that I need to do this, but it is definitely my least favorite hat.
The communicator hat.
With this hat, I make sure that all of our accomplishments are made public. Basically, once we finish a project, we like to share it online and show our work. We are proud of our work and we are happy with all the clients we have. For this, we use Facebook, Twitter and our blog.
It makes me so happy to get feedback from our clients. I like to forward nice messages to our teams and to spread the word of how happy our clients are. When our clients are not happy, I communicate this to our teams and we plan corrective actions together.
This hat takes more time than you would think. At Aycron, we take our communications very seriously and there is an entire workflow for publishing news.
My favorite hat?
After a lot of thought, I realize I don’t have a favorite hat. I like the combination manager/technical/communicator hat.
What’s your favorite hat?
