Reflecting on 6 years at Reelevant

When talking about multi-year journeys, some people might say something along the lines of “it flew right by” or that “it went so fast”: well, that’s not how I feel. Looking back to who I was when this journey started, I see a cocky kid who had struggled to handle his emotions: carelessly speaking, forced to go take a walk to get back control or simply not listening.

My first thought is about the people with whom I shared (and some still sharing) part of the journey: they worked with that kid and that wasn’t easy. I knew it back then and that I needed to change, but boy, it’s painful. Painful because it didn’t happen overnight, I made mistakes, I burned others.
Of course, I wish I hadn’t made those mistakes, but I trusted the fact that, as long as I knew I wanted to change, time would do its thing. Those people forgave my failures so I could grow and I’m thankful for that. Though the growth is never finished, I hope to be a better person now than back then.

Those last six years meant professional growth too. That kid (and I still do) had the urge to accomplish, and he tried a lot of things to do that. After a few months working alone in the cloud infrastructure part, I couldn’t bear to see what I considered the wrong roadmap. I believed that it was not up to the standard of the vision, so I switched to be a somewhat Product Manager (while still writing code, don’t worry).
Understanding what needs to be done is the root of what engineering is about, whatever the title you have. As soon as I felt the product wasn’t the thing to work on, I switched to other responsibilities: doing pre-sales, customer support, or implementation which led to a lot of learnings. Understanding underlying links and feedback loops between departments helps a lot in deciding what to do next, and I urge anyone to do that.

Looking back to those years, I must question the achievements, especially as someone who looks to achieve so much:

• We rebuilt the product from scratch. This was an engineer’s dream but a risky business gamble. Some bets made in this period are still compounding almost 4 years after the decision, which means we made good choices, but, to no experienced engineer’s surprise, those bets weren’t about technologies but about product design. Making clear boundaries between systems and always betting on generic implementation to fit the exact needs of customers (although I must admit selling to enterprises makes those easier).
• On the business side, we did scale our revenue (while keeping good gross margins) and proved that we had the capability to scale harder, and raised a Series A this year. Obviously, we wanted more: more customers, more revenue, better metrics. This is where questions were the hardest, answers painfully accepted. Nothing new under the sun, if something isn’t working, you need to adapt and do it fast.

While we did achieve some milestones, rest assured we failed quite a few projects: tried to sell to small businesses (<$100M revenue), building “gadget” features that nobody used, of course bad hirings, and way more still unfolding. I don’t want to detail each one, but I will say that if we wouldn’t have failed, that would have meant we didn’t explore enough.

I will finish by giving one piece of advice, which I think explains why I’m still there: aim to always be learning on your job, and if you can’t, change.
Looking forward to the next years, hopefully still learning and accomplishing our goals.