In what ways have you grown professionally during your time at Crossover?
Twice a year I join some of my Crossover peers that live in nearby cities. Every time we meet, we all agree that 1 year working at Crossover is equivalent to 5 years working in any other local company.
I have grown professionally way more than I expected since I joined almost 2 years ago. I joined as a Front End Architect and then I was promoted to Chief Architect just a few months later. 1 year passed by and I was promoted again to the Software Engineering Manager. I escalated the ladder and got the opportunity to face challenges I never imagined before: develop cutting edge technology, lead a worldwide team, interview and hire top engineers, architect high profile projects, manage teams, report directly to Senior VPs - it all sounds just so crazy in retrospect.
I have improved my leadership and communication skills. I've also broadened my knowledge in DevOps and Front End. Being the creator and lead maintainer of the most important Front-End tool (Angular Components Library) across the whole ESW organization has been the most impressive thing I have ever done, professionally.
Tell us about your team. How have your colleagues (teammates, managers, direct reports) helped you grow?
Every manager that I've had, no exceptions, has been a great source of learning and support. Some time ago, I was confident enough to tell my manager (a VP of Engineering) that I was not fulfilled with my current role (Software Engineer Manager). I loved building software, but not managing people. My manager found a role for me as a Chief Architect… all because he wanted the best for my career. That says a ton about the spirit of the company.
I've also had the opportunity to learn from my direct reports. I've hired mostly junior developers and have had the opportunity to coach them and also learn from them. I've grown more in leadership than I ever thought I could, and that's mainly because my team has allowed me to fail and get better.
You’ve tackled some huge challenges in your different roles at Crossover. Can you tell us about one of them?
I was once tasked with finding a way to reuse most of the code to make my team (the Rapid Prototype Team) move fast and deliver many frontend prototypes. My team and I created a library of components which could easily be reused among all the prototypes and would let us build prototypes in record time.
What started as a small project with ten Angular components is now (two years later) the cornerstone of roughly 100 projects spanned across more than six ESW companies. Thousands of screens have been built using the 90 components from our library.
I never, ever imagined that my innocent idea to solve a problem was going to have such a reach and impact company-wide. Even the Crossover web application is nowadays being rebuilt using the components library that I started.
