Engineering Principles - In Practice

Infobip Engineering has its values and principles of work. It's not only about reaching our business goals, but we also care about how it is done. Sound good, but what does that actually mean daily?

Engineering at Infobip is about solving business challenges with Product Management. Together, we develop and maintain valuable and well-crafted software services on the worldwide accessible infrastructure. We keep things simple with minimal hierarchy and the right number of roles to enable growth and scale our operations.

Infobip's company core values are innovation, growth, trust, and teamwork. Intertwined with the engineering principles of work, this is how we believe our engineers should act:

• Empower People - Be approachable, coach others and strive for great team results. It is in our culture to be open, collaborate with other teams and help where you see the need. Spread your knowledge and help others grow. We cherish teamwork so remember you are not here pursue success alone.

• Build Quality and Security In - Now, not later. Although we take agile and iterative approach to development (release early, then improve), this doesn't mean we should ever release any chunk of work without quality and security aspects in mind. Reliability, scalability and especially security are top priorities when designing our services and products or releasing any features.

• Always Deliver - Make it work, then make it better. We are a truly agile company which means we use iterative approach to incrementally complete tasks and projects. Perfect is the enemy of the good, so release as soon as your work can bring value to the company, but always keeping quality and security aspects in mind.

• Customer in Focus - If I was a customer, would I really pay for this task? It is easy to get carried away in over-engineering and local optimizations, so make sure you ask yourself what value does your task bring to the customers. Of course, there is always some work like resolving tech debt that has to be done in order to keep the system maintainable, but you should always have the customer and business value in mind.

• Autonomous Teams - Self-managed and aligned. Teams in Infobip have great freedom to choose their way of work, technology stack and architecture. On the other end this implies great responsibility for the stability, scalability and performance of their services. We work in teams, but not in silos - engineers need to have a bigger context and be aligned with the rest of the engineering and product direction.

• Challenge with respect - Build on top of each other's ideas. We love you to challenge and verify ideas on all levels. Often, a fresh view on existing implementation can bring new value. When challenging or being challenged, be open to discussion instead of being dismissive. There is usually a reason why something is being done in a certain way.

• No 'It's Not My Job' attitude - See how you can help instead. This doesn't mean that everything should be your job, but instead of criticizing and complaining, try to approach the problems you notice with positive and helpful attitude. Take initiative in making things better.

• Continuously Improve - Innovate → experiment → measure → reflect → repeat. This is a lean principle of work - to thrive, you should always be in the cycle of constant improvement. The best way to do it is through small, non-risky experiments, trying to find objective metrics you can use to measure improvements.

• Be transparent - Better to "over-communicate" than "under-communicate". In Infobip, almost all work is visible to everyone - from code in Bitbucket, Jira tasks in backlog, documentation in Confluence, meeting minutes to metrics and dashboards. We strongly believe in transparency.

So we might say that these values are like the glue that keeps the pieces of puzzles together to form a bigger picture.

But who are the pieces? I'm not sure if you ever heard about hypnotic jigsaw puzzles compounded of individual tiles with the ability to shift between two different color states, depending on the angle of view, confusing the identity of each puzzle piece—hiding, then revealing itself until spatially locked into place.

These are just some of the pieces - people who help transform the chaos and confusion into solutions... Besides fantastic performances and projects at work, many of our colleagues accomplish amazing projects and successes in their free time.

Here are some examples of our team living these values and becoming part of the Engineering team:

We have Book Authors

Our VP of Engineering, Damir Prusac, published "On the Trace of Agile Leadership: The Alphabet of Principles and Practices for Human Work and Life", a book on Agile which tells the story about leading the chage and going through the consequence and effects of such a change. The book tries to pin down these impediments, make them visible and suggest principles and practices you can use to improve your business and life.

From an Engineer to Engineering Director

Anja Hula joined Infobip as a student, this was her first real job. She started out as a Software Engineer and worked her way up first to the Team Lead role, then to Division Lead, and now Engineering Director. It’s been quite a journey! With this amazing opportunity her main focus will be the empowerment of people and enablement of efficient organization. To support and focus on the most important business priorities and achieving exceptional customer focus, we introduced LeSS (Large Scale Scrum) organizational framework. Another important topic that she is tackling is our company culture and how to keep it intact and nurture it during exponential growth.

From Music Producer to Software Engineer

Marko Pelovikj, from Stip im Macedonia, who moved to Vodnjan with his family. Marko finished "Academy for music arts + Sonology" (1999-2003 - Bachelor of Arts). His involvement with Web / Development / Programming for Desktop and later Mobile began in 2003 when he took up basic programming as a hobby. Throughout the next couple of years this developed into a fascination with all Software programming, Mobile Development and Web Design/Development and now, here he is. Marko says his approach to programming is not by the book, it's more artistic "Let's make it work and then fix it" approach. He prefers everything that includes production, a final result that can be seen, and that is the connection he sees between these two worlds, together with hard work and determination to succeed.

From Masters of Psychology and HR to Software Engineer

Marija Todtling joined Infobip in 2014 as part of Human resources with the education background in Psychology. Then she quit her job for programming and joined us back as software engineer. If someone asked her 7 years ago, where she saw herself, she certainly would not say "in development" “ So far she hasn't regretted it. When she looks back on this experience, the only thing she would really do differently from this position is that she would be less annoyed when she doesn't understand something! She would make coffee, inhale, reset, and start over.

These examples show how we approach each person individually - no matter your background, we consider your potential because we believe that each of us brings a different perspective and can make a quality contribution in their own way, adding unique details to this exciting and dynamic puzzle of opportunities.