Career

Roles

At Abtion we wear many hats. As physical hats, you don’t always wear the same hat. The role of a person in a project may differ from the role the same person has in a different project.

The following descriptions are indications of what is expecting of a person having a role. The responsibilities are not unique to the person in this role. On the contrary, it is expected that all team members contribute to the well functioning of the team and the company. The list of responsibilities is the guidance that allows all the teammates to know what is everyone’s role.

Project Lead

• Be a product owner substitute.
• Be the decision-maker when conflicts arise.
• Create an atmosphere where people share their doubts, concerns, and opinions.
• Integrate all participants in the project.
• Sense when a team member is lagging behind and take action.
• Know the core strengths and weaknesses of all team members.
• Make sure that a single person does not hold too much responsibility.
• Ensure that all developers enjoy the codebase (TDDed, well maintained, sane dependencies, etc.).
• Make smart choices in regards to the budget.
• Cheer up the team when needed. Do not let pessimism sink the project.

CTO

Guiding stars for the role

• Leadership and coaching
• Architectural overview and direction
• Cross-organizational mindset
• Scalability and security
• Client value focus
• Face of the company

Responsibilities

• Technology & Product
• Maximize tools efficiency
• Ensure maximum value for client (in collaboration with product & sales)
• Improve product / engineering coordination (workflow)
• Ensure code quality / test coverage
• Improve DI turnover (ROI)
• Increase security

People & Culture

• Bring up technical leadership
• Bring up EMs
• Maximize retention
• Bring up senior developers
• Expand team (hire)
• Improve engineers’ consultancy skills
• Improve company professionality
• Keep culture

Business

• Increase customer satisfaction (align expectations)
• Coach clients (agile)
• Maximize clients budget (by bringing value / suggesting smart investments)
• Maximize team / tools based on clients

Processes

• Ensure good team processes
• Improve DI process

Administration

• Budget
• Strategy planning

Jesper Sørensen - Principal Engineer

Guiding stars for the role

• Teach leadership and coaching
• Responsible for tools
• Architectural overview and direction
• Cross-organizational mindset
• Focus on developer experience
• Scalability and security
• Client value focus

Responsibilities

On-project

• Be an ambassador for our development culture.
• Balance refactoring and delivering when coding, planning and mentoring.
• Help to solve difficult challenges. Including hands-on coding and taking architectural decisions.
• Report about projects’ needs together with project leads.
• Turn around highly complex projects so that less experienced developers can collaborate on them.
• Coach developers on how to use the established technology to solve the problems..
• Improve developer experience (DX).
• Work with “project lead developers” on architectural decisions.
• Work with “project lead developers” on technology usage and tooling for the project.

Technology & Product

• Maximize tools efficiency.
  • Project templates.
  • Software (editors, collaboration, development environments).
  • Remote pairing equipment.
• Part of “Tech Leaders” group.
• Ensure good developer experience (DX) across multiple projects.
• Ensure maximum value for the client (in collaboration with CTO).
• Ensure code quality/test coverage.

Usage of time

• 80% On-project
• 20% Technology & Product

Engineering Manager

Guiding stars for the role

• Leadership and people development
• Team collaboration
• Process improvement
• Culture and community building

Process

• Facilitates meetings with the team (and the client) to continuously improve the workflow. Eg. through retrospectives.
• Ensures that the processes and the team work fit our values best possible.

Tech

• Facilitates and takes part in knowledge-sharing. Eg. through pair programming.

Team

• Helps developers grow their skillset. Eg. through conversations about goal setting.
• Takes part in hiring, retention, and offboarding.
• Helps colleagues to solve conflicts.
• Sets managees’ salaries based on their skill set within our progression framework.
• Takes part in defining guidelines for the company.
• Takes part in setting teams for projects with a focus on the team members’ optimal learnings

Delivery

• Flags to the client when their demands require us to sacrifice quality (or their money).
• Helps make decisions on when to slack on our delivery. Eg. in edge cases when team members get stressed.

Business Development Engineer

Guiding stars for the role

• Between client, tech and project

Solution-centered software engineer who consults customers on how to create, maintain, and expand their solutions. They may lead a team during the development phase. Business development engineers focus on a few clients so that they can stay close to the technical implementation, the industry, and the people behind the solution. 
They work with long-term clients to engage in long-term collaboration rather than trying to establish new relationships. They collaborate with sales, solution architects (tech leads), and UXers to find the best recommendations for the client through workshops. Later on, they work with a development team (UI, developers) to implement the solution.

Business development engineers are firstly evaluated as software engineers. Other KPIs involve client satisfaction and rebizz.

Usage of time

• 90% On-project
• 10% Client engagement