Being a Product Company

Valentina Patrascu

What does it mean to be a part of a team that develops a software product?

It means everything because it has helped me evolve – even if I didn’t want to sometimes. Learning new things, the easy way or the hard way, is priceless either way.

Do you feel like we have a project mindset or a product mindset?

I think overall we have product mindset because we work on products. But as a team lead, I also have a project mindset. I have to think of both short-term and long-term goals, thinking of both the ongoing work, new features, new improvements, and the time it takes to deliver them.

How creative do you feel you get to be?

Creativity is an evolving process for me. During my career, creativity has become more important and it is something that I feel I am better at than before. At the beginning, I felt I had to prove what I could do, but now I am more relaxed about it. I feel like I have the right amount of creativity skills for the job, but also that I am just at the beginning of developing my creativity.

How does the culture of Centric align with you and the products we create?

I think I align with the Centric culture. Sometimes It can be difficult to look outside of your part of the development of the product and to focus on the process, to see the big picture. When I was able to see the big picture, I was better able to connect with the culture of Centric. This is something I try to explain to colleagues – how to connect with the culture of Centric and what's it in for them.

Brindusa Gamaniata

My focus in the software development life cycle of a product is on QA. Together with my colleagues in Romania and the Netherlands, we try to make sure we deliver what the clients need and ensure the quality of what we deliver. We do this by testing products from different points of view and trying to automate as much as possible. We also strive to use the latest technologies in terms of testing and development. We try to use the proper tools to make it faster. That’s why some mature products are rewritten with modern software architectures using in-demand frameworks.

Through this, we strive to maintain a product mindset while also focusing on SaaS and Continuous Delivery. If in the past we delivered specifically what the customer needs were, we are currently focused more and more on quality in terms of functional and non-functional point of views, which is more aligned with the Centric approach. If the application is slow, it is important - performance is a priority, also security, accessibility and others. In the past, I saw that we didn’t use Agile to the best of our ability and so we didn’t deliver as often. Now, we try to deliver at a different speed and with continuous feedback from customers. We have deployment processes in place, and we use an automation pipeline so that when we release something, we know that it is high quality since all our quality gates validated the release and all our tests passed.

Another part of our product mindset is our collaboration with our customers. We get feedback from customers and end users, either through more formal user testing sessions where the development team can see what users are doing or through site visits and talking to customers. The information is then used for prioritization and risk management.

Iulian Mitrea

What does it mean to be a part of a team that develops a software product?

Making a product can be hard sometimes but building and maintaining a team that can continuously delivers that product is the real challenge.

What is your role in the lifecycle of the products you work on?

I’m the one who tries to make sure that we deliver high quality products with a highly skilled and motivated team. Also, I need to make sure the entire quality process is in place, is applied, and is transparent to our teams and customers.

How flexible do you think things are at Centric? What impact does that have on the products we create?

In general, I think Centric is doing a great thing in allowing people to create new processes from scratch or update existing processes or anything that relates to our daily work really. At Centric, we believe that trial and error is part of your learning process. This opportunity creates a good mindset, and this can be seen in the level of quality we deliver in our products.

How would you describe the collaboration between different disciplines and different countries?

I’m happy to see an upward trend in the collaboration between different disciplines and different countries. There are dozens of common tasks and nice projects ahead. The trio of the Netherlands, Lithuania, and Romania are working to achieve a common way of working and we are seeing some strong examples of knowledge sharing.

How creative do you feel you get to be? How are your ideas received?

I feel that all creative ideas are welcomed. We know that there is always space to improve and this is why I encourage my colleagues to share their ideas and then start to work on implementing them.