Highlights from the first four days in Casavo
The first week in Casavo is gone now, and I’m overwhelmed by how many stuff I saw and heard.
As I said to many friends asking how it was going: after the first 4 days in Casavo my brain was almost on fire 🤯
Within the first 3 days I already:
- followed a business onboarding on the domain of Casavo and specifically on the domain of our tribe “Sellers”,
- followed a similar onboarding on the tech part of the same domain,
- learned the lifecycle of our software systems, specifically how they are automatically built, tested and deployed on a kubernetes cluster on AWS,
- participated in an brainstorming session for defining the Q1 2022 OKRs of our tribe,
- learned the main events of our squad, which follow a quite classical Scrum cadence,
- merged my first pull request 😅,
- joined a design and tech debt session on the backend of one of our software systems,
- explored how events are keys in driving the behaviour of our systems,
- talked about a bug in production (an issue with an unexpected event) and how to fix it (very quickly!),
- learned about the git commit convention followed by the squad,
- asked questions here and there on Slack,
- talked with the squad coach, and share with him some insights and cool topics to study (e.g. the great talk by Henrik Kniberg on being a change agent),
- chatted with my onboarding buddy on several topics.
This Friday I stopped for a moment to reflect on those first days… here are some of my highlights:
Data is important
Data is important, damn important for a fast-moving company like Casavo: as a squad, when working on new features, you have to remember that developing the plain feature is not enough; you have to take care of collecting proper business data, so that other systems can process and display those data and help business experts to learn and take further business decisions.
A product company is different, for real
I worked almost all my life in tech consulting companies, and this is my first experience in a real product company. I felt the difference almost the second day when I joined a tribe-wide session to define (together!) the OKRs for this quarter!
The cool thing is that in Casavo everyone can really contribute and have a word on those topics, as the business experts are open to discuss and explain their perspective on the business, and welcome ideas and feedbacks.
Also, in Casavo you can really decide how you want to have an impact on the product: everyone is a product contributor, so it’s up to you how to contribute to meet the goals of Casavo and the OKRs of your tribe.
Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose are not void words here, as far as I saw this week.
Start from the product
As a tech person, when starting in a company like Casavo, the best way to spend your time is to understand the new business context, understand how the market works, talk to the business experts and product managers, listen to the words they use, ask a ton of questions (taking the risk to be hated 😅), understand the various user journeys, testing the actual product on the stage env, etc.
Luckily enough, I had the chance to also walk the Figma wireframes and the high-level event storming, which help a lot in having a visual understanding of the whole end-to-end flow.
Passion counts ❤️
All the people I talked to were really passionate about the business and the products they were contributing. I’m really happy to find passion in so many young people (the average age in my squad is 24–25 years!).
