My name is Kemal. I was born and raised in Bosnia and Herzegovina, now I live in Germany. My days go by in trying to simultaneously play the roles of a husband, father, team leader, geek, good person ... sometimes it works, but most of the time I run with the flow and give my best.
My interests include #health, #parenting, #productivity, #leadership, #privacy, #selfhosting, #goodmusic with guitars, #fishing, #jogging ... and I hack on my #emacs configuration pretty regularly.
As a manager one of my tasks is to do yearly performance evaluations of the employees in my team.
I take this very seriously, as although I speak regularly with my people about tasks and behaviors, this yearly review gives me time to pause and reflect deeper about the stuff I (and the company) find important and how does the employee measure against that.
During the year I keep notes of all 1:1 meetings we have and also of stuff that happens between them that catch my eye, positive as well as possible improvement points. During the yearly review preparations, I sit down and go thru all the notes in order to consolidate the feedback I want to give to the employee.
So it's about 30 months now since I took over building and leading an engineering team.
Building is the right word, as on the first day I started there was no team. There were just 2-3 engineers in India, that started doing some testing in the last sprint and had absolutely no clue what they are doing. (Somebody told them they are the test team and that the software to test is in Artifactory …)
Something over 18 months ago a big change happened in my work life. After years of trying, learning, searching for ways forward, changing jobs on the same level … I was appointed team leader in my company and tasked with building up a team completely from scratch. I already wrote on the topic several times, this is a follow up.
Had a strange discussion the other day in the project. We had a Release Meeting and my team was showing the current state of testing, defects and so on. During the presentation I intentionally said my Def-M, he should highlight in the Dashboard how long bugs are open in our product (we have a couple of them dragging on for more then 6 months). Of course this caught my managers eye.
Now it has been a bit over 12 weeks since I took up new responsibilities, so time to give you an update what went on since the last post on this topic.
What I can already reveal is that it became easier to master a day at work and also some stuff started to fall in place :)!
6 weeks ago I took over my first job in management as a team lead in a big OEM car manufacturing company.
I worked for the last 14 years in different positions in testing, development and project management within the same company and did some 2 more years before that as an external HiL and In-Car tester for a different OEM. So I think it's safe to say, that I was a techie and now I became a boss.
I decided to write a blog post about my first 6 weeks into the transition, because I hope this will help me reflect on my experiences and sort the stuff in my head … and there is a lot :).