How to foster a people-first engineering culture?

Oleg

Hi, Stefan! Great to see you here with me today. Thanks for finding time to join and record the video podcast. Could you please start by telling us a bit about yourself and your professional background?

Stefan

Yeah. Hi, Oleg! Thank you for inviting me, and I'm happy to be here. So, I'm Stefan Anca. I'm originally from Romania. I've been a developer and a leader for almost 15 years now. I studied in Romania a little bit, and then I came to Germany in 2004, studied in an international university in Bremen, and then did a bachelor's in electrical engineering, computer science and a master's in smart systems with a focus on NLP and AI. And I started working in 2009, so quite some time ago. I did a bit of application programming here in Germany on Python. Then, I decided to move to Berlin in 2012 to join the startup scene. And I've been here ever since, more or less, working in startups since 2012, and I really enjoy it. So, I started working at a company builder called Project A Ventures where I did a bit of backend, but then started my career as a mobile app developer doing Android applications, mostly for the ventures that we built in this venture builder. And then I left it after two years and joined one of the startups.

I was programming a VPN app for Android and a VPN app company, and I got to see how startup really works. It was an amazing experience because the startup grew from 6 employees to 50 within a year, a year and a half. So, I got to see a lot of the dos and don'ts about startup life and how you can actually motivate or demotivate people as a manager. I became a freelancer afterwards. I freelanced for about a year and a half, doing also Android developer. I've worked for companies like Immobilian Scout here in Germany, also a bit for some Rocket Internet ventures. And in this time, I realized I really would like to be a team manager. I really have fun putting together a team, working together with people, motivating them, creating a team atmosphere, and building cool digital products together. And so, setting up this goal, I realized that, as a freelancer, it's very hard for me to actually get a management position. So, I have to go to a company where I can acquire these soft skills. So, I joined the Boston Consulting Group, BCG Digital Ventures, which has an office also here in Berlin, and there, basically, I still worked as an engineer, but as an IT consultant, and in teams, I had the chance of actually leading teams from the beginning and learning a lot of things about presentation, communication, people management, like building slides, of course, but also leadership and coaching.

And I have to say in this time I really enjoyed my time. I worked on projects that were quite small – a few weeks – but also projects that were over a year, a year and a half, and also with different sizes of engineering teams. I have to say this is where I discovered my passion for team building, for coaching, for people-focused engineering. And this is something that I am currently following to this day. And, basically, after four years in IT consulting, I decided it's time to go back to the startup world, on the ground, to build a product. I co-founded Likeminded, a mental health startup, with my Co-Founders, Milan and Kimberly. And it was my first CTO and Co-Founderposition officially. I've been doing this for the last three years and really enjoying it. Responsible for, of course, building up the team, I built up the engineering and product team from scratch, got hired 10 people, brought a good friend of mine to be a CPO. And yeah, we've gone over three years, and now we're a B2B company and doing well.

Oleg

What inspired you to start Likeminded? What unique solutions does Likeminded provide to improve employees’ mental health and well-being?

Stefan

Good question. So, I have a passion also for mental health, for taking care of my own spiritual and mental health. I've had the unfortunate experience of having two burnouts in my career over the last 12 years. And I was looking for a product that actually helps people. So, when I came across my Co-Founders, I said, 'Okay, that's a great match.' They had a vision of actually bringing mental health to everyone in the world and educating the world that there is no stigma in having mental health issues, that everyone goes through that. So, they also saw this market has been long neglected, and the topic is stigmatized, and it was, you know, gaining a lot of relevance, especially during the pandemic and afterwards. So, a lot of factors came together to continue or to approach the mental health in a business context. So, maybe just a little bit about Likeminded, Likeminded today is a B2B company that provides mental health services to employees of companies that buy the product in order to make these employees more resilient to stress factors, improve their well-being, and prevent the depression and burnout, which, of course, on the company side can cause quite a lot of costs.

Oleg

Thanks for the response. Could you elaborate on the philosophy behind Likeminded and its mission to champion mental health in the corporate world?

Stefan

So, our philosophy is really about starting with education. Educating people about mental health is an important part of what we do. A lot of older companies or companies with managers who haven't gone through mental health issues themselves still have sick stigma, and they don't understand that actually It's everyone who has issues of stress, anxiety. Having mental health problems is not being sick, it's, you know, part of normal life. So, we do a part of educating, but of course that doesn't help us sell the product. But we also actually believe that everyone has the ability within themselves to learn tools, to deal with mental health issues, to improve their resilience. And when these employees get to know the tools and then learn the tools that we give them with the help of our product and our psychologists, they can achieve greater potential in their productivity and their resilience to stress, and, of course, reaching higher outputs and more performance for the company. So therefore, the philosophy is that we actually believe that improving the mental health of employees has a measurable effect on their satisfaction in their performance in the company.

Oleg

Got it. How does this philosophy of people-first engineering play out in the technology and engineering practices of Likeminded? And can you share an example of a specific instance where prioritizing people in engineering had a significant impact on your product or team?

Stefan

Sure. So, what I mean by people-first engineering is trying to, as a manager, focus a lot of the time on the people, making sure the people have whatever they need to be very productive, to feel comfortable, and to feel like psychologically safe in the environment. So, I do this with providing them the necessary tools they need to complete their work, the good processes, efficient processes, and motivate them through setting individual goals. So, I have frequent one-on-ones with the people in my team. I get to know them on a personal level, find out also their personal and career goals, and try to combine that with the company goals. Otherwise, it doesn't make sense to help them develop on the personal side, but it doesn't help the company. So, then we set something like the 6 to 12-month goals to work on, and then people feel that I actually care for their personal development. It's very important, especially in an engineering team, to make sure as a manager that the engineers feel safe, and they're not disturbed by external influences and interruptions.

So, a big part of what I do as a manager is keep my developers focused and kind of protect the product team from stakeholder interruption. I think, for me, team building is one of the most important things of keeping a team happy. So, I invest a lot of my time in actually coming up with ideas how we can get people to sit together in a room, to meet from time to time, share experiences, private kind of get to know each other with the events either in the office or outside the office – team lunches or dinners where nonwork topics are discussed. I believe when people get comfortable around each other and they share personal information, then this builds trust. And this trust shows up later, when there's a deadline and there's crunch time, and people have to spend some extra hours on a day or maybe work on a weekend if it's needed. And that's when personal relationship and the trust in the team actually pays off.

So, you asked me about an example where prioritizing people had a significant impact. So, I think that the easiest example for me to say is people follow me in companies where I go. So, if I move jobs and then at some point I'm hiring, I talk to people who I've worked with in the past, who I've applied this kind of strategy, who knows that I care about them, and then they will come and join me if they're currently available or dissatisfied in their teams. So, at Likeminded, basically, within four months after I joined, I got four people to join me: the CPO, one of the most important hires, then two engineers, and then the brother of a former person that I coached, also an engineer. So, I think that's a direct outcome of how I deal with people and how I care about people.

Oleg

Great. Thanks for sharing the examples. How do you stay updated on industry trends and developments? Are there any resources you find particularly valuable?

Stefan

Good question. I think it's very important to stay updated in the world of fast-moving technology today. What I do is I register on for email newsletters. So, right now, I have a combination of newsletters arriving in my inbox. I use the TL;DR crunchbase LeadDev, which gives me a combination of latest technologies but also startups and funding. I listen to podcasts, right? So, among your podcast, then also like CTO podcasts, AI podcasts, technical podcasts from the U.S. and Germany. Then lately, I also go to meetups. I mean, that requires more time. There is like a CTO round table here in Berlin or CTO craft meetups from time to time.

Oleg

Are there any professionals or leaders in your network who inspire you in your professional journey?

Stefan

Absolutely. This is also one of my philosophies for personal growth. So, I find mentors who somehow embody the skills that I don't have or that are further in their careers where I would like to go, and then I kind of try to ask them, you know, what do I need to get to where they are. And I have mostly mentors who have been former colleagues of mine at the different companies where I worked. I have some from my university network. So, colleagues that I've studied with in university who are now successful. If I reorient myself and set different goals for myself, I try to find people who are already there, and contact them, and say, 'Hey, would you like to mentor me?' That's my approach.

Oleg

In the mental healthcare space, what unique challenges and opportunities have you encountered compared to other industries?

Stefan

Right. The mental health space is definitely a bit different. So, the product that we're selling, mental health support, a lot of the companies are not really educated about mental health. They're not aware of the challenges of employees with mental health. So, they may think, 'We don't need this product. It's not a problem.' And that's one of the challenges. So, we have to make them aware, actually, you need the product. Also, the service is quite new and there's a lot of competition on the market, right? There's different mental health startups out there. So, companies don't know yet how to choose what service. Is the cheaper service better, the one that offers more formats, the one where the psychological meetings with people are longer? So, we try to give them some guidance in choosing the mental health solution.

And we accompany HR managers through the process of introducing it, like rolling it out to their employees. On the technical side, one of the challenges in the mental health space is about user data. So, in the actual product, psychologists talk to a user, like in this case an employee, about their issues. This conversation is totally private. The data that happens there, like the video and audio exchange, is truly anonymous. We're not allowed to access this data. So, you know, it's a bit hard to get the user feedback from the user experience perspective. Did it work? Did it not work? So, we try to ask questions afterwards, or we try to get before some survey questions. But in general, it's quite strictly regulated. So, that makes it different than let's say other products that I've worked in.

Oleg

Are there any particular technologies or trends that you believe will have a profound impact on the mental health tech industry?

Stefan

Yes, I believe data and artificial intelligence will have a profound impact on the future of mental health.

We are currently in the process of digitalizing mental health services and storing this mental health data, which in the past was just, you know, in the cabinet of a therapist. People sat down on a couch, and maybe the therapist took some notes on a piece of paper, right? Now, we have the chance to actually get a lot of this information in a digital form, store it in a database, make sure it's anonymous, what I said before, store it in a database, and then, with this, we can create large amounts of data that can actually help research to understand what formats of therapies or what topics are easier to solve or what tools help people more. And I think that this anonymous data can create machine learning models that identify kind of the persona, understand what the needs are, and are able to offer some personalized recommendations for solutions in actually improving their mental health. I mean, Likeminded is partly working on this, but I think there's a lot more opportunities there.

Oleg

As we already defined, building effective teams seems to be a key aspect of your experience. What strategies do you employ in building, especially international context?

Stefan

Yes. Indeed, building international teams is my passion, and I do love it. I think it comes from the fact that I've studied in this international university for five years in a very intercultural environment where over 100 cultures were represented. So, there was really a mix of cultures. So, I have the feeling in all of the companies that I worked in the last 15 years, I'm trying to recreate a little bit of this interculture, international feeling. So, in terms of effective teams, I think it's important to bring in people on site from time to time. So, I'm not a big fan of the fully-remote culture. I think it's very important that people see eye to eye and then understand who the other person is, and you know, like sitting down for lunch, sitting down for dinner, after work, or for breakfast, something like this.And then you kind of understand what the other person is about in terms of what they like, what they don't like, what their culture is. You know, maybe some people are more religious, maybe some people have a family and have different schedules. So, that's all kind of the part of the effective team-building. As I said before, it's very important to get to know people personally on a personal level.

And I try to foster this by having team building activities, ideally a collaborative environment, something like an escape room, a treasure hunt, cooking, or spending time outside. I think, as a manager, it's important to show the team that you're part of the team. So, be present on site, be in the team, make them see that I am human. So, if we're talking about sharing something personal, I would be the first one to share something personal about myself, share some of my good experience, some of the mistakes that I've made, be open that making mistakes is totally fine, show them that I am human. Just because I'm a CTO or a manager doesn't mean that I am better than them, doesn't mean that I make less mistakes. It's just a different role that I have. So, I think this is a big part of creating very effective teams. And of course, you have to understand people are very individual level, especially international environment, because people might have different cultures, and therefore, these cultures affect their goal setting. So, because they come from a different culture, they might set a different goal for themselves. That's why I talk to them also in one-on-one and understand what their personal goals are and what their career goals are.

And then once that's done, we set some goals for six months, and we make it public to the team. I think that's very important because if the team knows this person is moving into front-end development in the next six months, then they might easily let them have this ticket. So, the whole team works together to meet the individual goals of one person. I think that's very powerful. Last but not least, have fun with the team, whether it's going for lunch, or going for dinner, or going for beers, singing, dancing, whatever the team likes. I think that fosters a great international context. In the engineering team at Likeminded, we had almost no people from the same country. So, six different, no, five different people, including myself, from five different countries. And the mix was exactly three girls and two guys. So, it was very, very diverse.

Oleg

Diversity and inclusion are critical in fostering innovation. How do you ensure that diversity within your team, and what role does technology play in promoting inclusivity?

Stefan

Yeah, so I said before it starts with hiring, right? So, we have a hiring process that doesn't discriminate. People from all different genders and cultures are welcome to apply. Yeah, I had three female and two male team members from six different countries. Now, I see it written down in the past some people, you know, grew up in two different countries. I think it's also by chance. So, I don't specifically, like when I recruit for people, then I say, 'Okay, now we need to balance the genders more, or we need to balance interculturality.' It just happens, and then everyone gets a chance. But one important part that you mentioned is inclusivity. So, this is something that I proactively work on in my team, make sure that everyone has a chance to speak up in a meeting, let's say a retrospective or a team meeting. And if I see that maybe someone is a bit shy and doesn't feel like speaking up, I ask them directly, 'So, what do you think about this topic? Would you like to add something?'

Oleg

Given the global shift towards the remote work, what insights or strategies have you found most effective in maintaining connected and productive team in a virtual setting?

Stefan

This is a good question. So, as I mentioned before, I'm not a fan of fully-remote teams. I think meeting people face-to-face creates trust and feeling of psychological safety inside the team. But the market is a bit different. So, I think it's definitely important to have collaborative work. You can even do it remotely. I've seen a pair programming done remotely that worked quite well. Retrospectives, one of the most important things, is almost always done remotely, and even team meetings and some games, like scribble or putting together a puzzle as a team, that works out. In terms of strategies, I make sure that the video is always on. This makes sure that the other person is focused on the meeting and at least present. And then, encourage people to have ad hoc Google call, or a huddle on Slack, or whatever communication, maybe a phone call, if discussion is needed to eliminate this remote barrier. What else? Keeping the team connected. I think the daily standup is very important. So, the team has the feeling that something's happening, that people are working. Also, keeping track of the duration that tickets take to move in the board. So, if they sit too long and in progress, then we notice it in the planning because the color changes or something. So, that kind of keeps people engaged.

Oleg

How do you attract tech talents who are passionate about mental health, and what qualities do you look for in potential team members?

Stefan

Yeah. So, we've done a lot of applications via LinkedIn. We have a lot of activity there from our marketing team. And we put out job ads there and all the standard job portals in Germany. I don't know exactly, but I think there's a few, but a lot of people who are passionate about mental health come to us directly and say, 'Hey, I'm really interested. Do you have a job for me?' Back in 2021-2022, we also worked with recruiters because the market was hard. In the last two years, so 2023-2024, it's easier. There's a lot of talent on the market. What we look in, you know, potential team members is definitely an interest about mental health. We discuss their mental health experiences in the interview, but just because they didn't have experiences doesn't mean they cannot join us. But, of course, we need to see some sort of interest there. What qualities do I look in for team members? I would say in my team, they have to be a team player as number one quality. So, no lone programmers or ninjas. Engineers should have an eye for product and user experience. So, what I call product engineers, you know, question the features, think of the user perspective, use the product proactively, say, 'I don't like this', or 'This flow is too long'. But some of the key skills that I expect are people to be accountable for their tasks, to take responsibility for areas of the development life cycle, and who are open to talk, get feedback, improve themselves, and have fun with the team.

Oleg

How is your development team structured? Have you ever outsourced to an external tech vendor?

Stefan

So, currently, the development team has one backend and infrastructure engineer, another senior backend. So, two back-end engineers, one of them doing infrastructure, one senior front-end engineer, and a front-end intern, and one full-stack engineer who's kind of doing both back end and front end, and one data scientist. So, in total, five, no, six with the intern in the engineering team. The question about outsourcing. Yes, we have outsourced. I have had experiences with different outsourcing teams in my career from different countries. Latest one, even at Likeminded. So, before I joined as a CTO and Co-Founder, the first version of the app, the MVP, was built by an agency from Serbia.

Oleg

And what were the precise factors that prompted you to consider IT outsourcing?

Stefan

So, I think in the experience that I've had, the main factors were always cost saving. So, usually, outsourcing is cheaper than hiring a team. And timing, right? So, usually, in a competitive market, it's hard to get a team of, I don't know, two, three, four engineers on the ground. It takes time, and it takes money. So, if you want to get a product, or an MVP, or a feature done fast, outsourcing gives you a team that can do it for you. So, it's usually cost saving, short deadlines, or missing resources for a particular stack. But I've also encountered politics. So, a company that we've consulted in the past had connections to an agency, and then there was always customary to use that agency. So, they just said, 'We have to use them.'

Oleg

What are the benefits and drawbacks of IT outsourcing?

Stefan

So, I think the benefits are the speed, right? You can ramp up an engineering team very quickly. Ideally, that team has worked together before, so it's well-connected. You can work on several features in parallel. So, assuming you have a team on site and a team that's outsourced, then they can work on different things. Their communication needs to be very good. And you can get an MVP out very quickly, with cheap development costs in the best case. I think that's the benefits. In terms of disadvantages, I think it can go very wrong if the communication doesn't work out. So, most of the outsourcing experiences that I've had didn't work out because of communication issues. So, the outsource team built stuff that was out of sync with the current product roadmap on the ground, or the direction of the product roadmap on the ground changes very quickly because we're a startup, and we're very agile, and then all of a sudden we need to build something else. And then the outsource team is still building the old stuff. And then it just, you know, kind of wasting time or wasting resources.

So, I would say the disadvantages – you need to invest a lot of time in communication. Ideally, you would have a project manager that's dedicated to keeping the outsource team informed and like in check that they're building the right things. Then, you also need to invest some engineering time either from the tech lead or a senior engineer to make sure that the code quality is correct, or they're following the code guidelines that you want to adhere to in case that such people are there, right? There is no engineering team on the ground, and then they just do it by their own kind of policies. And what I've seen also in the past is it doesn't work when the outsourcing company is kind of not honest about the resources. So, they sell senior developer hours, but they put a junior person there. I've also seen outsourcing companies that overbooked their senior engineers. So, they were very capable engineers on the outsourcing team, but they had to work for three different projects at the same time, and they were booked like three full days, you know? So, obviously, they didn't have time to invest in the code that came out with poor quality. I mean, this is kind of like the worst cases.

Oleg

As we're moving closer to the end of our conversation, what advice would you give to other companies considering IT outsourcing?

Stefan

I would say outsourcing makes sense for building a prototype MVP before hiring an engineering team on the ground to get something out there. But just because this prototype MVP has been programmed outside, it doesn't mean that it has to stay. So, once the engineering team is on the ground, they should be given the option to replace it, not necessarily have to use it. I would say use outsourcing for supporting function like QA or test automation for existing teams, maybe from DevOps. And if possible, have the outsourced engineers be fully integrated into the team. So, they take part in standups, they work on the same Jira board, et cetera.

Oleg

That was the main reason why communication didn't work in your previous experience? Correct? So they were not integrated.

Stefan

I think that was one of the examples where it didn't work out. They were not integrated. So, there was no visibility into what they were doing.

Oleg

Yeah, that wouldn't work for many cases. Outsourcing team, as per my opinion, should be integrated closely with in-house team.

Stefan

Yeah, there's also a use case where the outsourcing team or some outsource developers can be used for some resources that are not internally available. So, if we're talking about some specific knowledge, like IoT or Bluetooth – some knowledge that is hard to find, then it's worth using some experts from an outsourced company.

Oleg

Stefan, thanks for your time. Thanks for your answers. I'm sure our auditory will find your answers valuable, and they will get some insights that we'll use in the future.

Stefan

Thank you very much for your time, Oleg. Thanks for inviting me, and it was a pleasure to be here.