… in Who we are
We are a diverse and friendly team of around 20 members consisting of developers, designers, planners, doers, thinkers, problem-solvers, mentors, trainers, singers, players and so much more. What we are not having is dedicated project managers. Every single member of our team knows what needs to be done and strives to achieve the best possible result with what we have. We bring together people from 14 different countries (still growing) in our office in central vienna. Through this many different views we learn of each other and from each other, this is what unifies all Platogos.
… in What we learned
We started from zero and built a platform which is enjoyed by millions of players. Not everything always went smoothly and out of these mistakes we learned a lot. We follow the “build fast, fail fast” philosophy, because if you don’t try you can’t innovate. The biggest learning here is to always focus first on the MVP and validate your hypothesis. Feature bloating and over engineering need to be constantly fought, because no matter how experienced you are they always creep in.
… in How we work
Over many years we have developed our own custom feature development process. This is how we start with a single idea and end up with a final version that our users can enjoy for a long time. We accomplished this by running many, many retrospectives and we still meet for a retrospective every 5-6 weeks to further evolve how we work & communicate with each other. We don’t believe in hierarchies and rather focus on taking responsibilities. This gives every team member a lot of freedom in how they can support each other and bring our product forward. This combined with our established process makes us a truly agile team that can quickly react to our ever changing market environment.
… in Which tools we use
We have a big stack of tools we use in our daily business. They are there to support us in our work and this is also how we choose them. We find tools that fit our work style, we don’t fit our workstyle to a tool. Tools help us to share information with each other and in our modern times they give us freedom to work when we want and where we want. Before COVID started we always worked together in our office. We enjoyed the contact and directly talking with each other, without planning meetings upfront. We needed to transition our workstyle to the virtual world. The tool that helped us the most doing so was Discord. It helped us greatly to stay in contact in a time without much contact. Discord is a chat server in which you can set up so-called channels. You can see which members are in which channels, this feels like looking through the different rooms in our office and we also used them like that. We set up a code of conduct, when you are allowed to join into a room occupied by someone else. This made it possible to immediately and directly have contact with each other, removing the blocker of writing a message first or scheduling a meeting. It allows you to quickly see who is working today without needing to look into your calendar and sometimes you can just join someone in our coffee channel and exchange about your lives. Now that we are also back again in our office, you sometimes have to walk around the whole space until you find the person you want to talk to instead of just clicking.
… in What tech we love
We love technology and can talk about this topic all day long. For the start let’s focus on which programming languages we are using. Our main ones are ruby, javascript, typescript & elixir. There are many, many more and in this blog our team members will share some of them with you and so much more. So follow us and stay tuned.
