Roman, how did you come to Paysenger? Tell us a little about the company?
I came to Paysenger on a recommendation. I was contacted by the company and asked to assess the complexity of developing mobile applications. Let me say a few words about the project. Paysenger is a service for monetizing your audience. I delved into the specifics of the project and collected the necessary data on the team composition, technologies, and development stages. After that, I was offered to continue working at the company, and I headed the application development department.
What are the responsibilities of a mobile development manager? What did you have to do?
A manager has many responsibilities, but they depend on the stage of the project. At the start, I focused on selecting specialists for the upcoming tasks, and engaged in preparatory work, such as collecting technical requirements, setting tasks for UI/UX designers. At that time, everything was complicated by the fact that not all user stories were described, but the deadline date had already been determined. For this reason, we started development with non-functional application requirements: creating an architectural framework, a logging system, navigation, and integrated secondary libraries that we might need in the future.
In the company, I controlled the setting and implementation of tasks for developers, checked the technical implementation, the transfer of functionality to testers, and the preparation of the release. In addition to this, I have other functions: working with requests for changes and defects, improving internal rules and methodologies, working with risks, and maintaining a friendly atmosphere in the team. In general, a separate interview could be given about the list of responsibilities – there are many, and they are all different.
What was the most difficult task you faced when developing a mobile application?
Probably, the most laborious task was the business requirement to start developing client applications without a ready-made API. We had to describe the format of the data that we wanted to receive from the future API and make stub files for them. The first ready-made methods appeared in a couple of months, and we, turning off these stubs, were already receiving dynamic data. It was a very dangerous experiment, but it ended successfully for us. This risk turned out to be justified: in the end, we did not miss the release date.
How many people work in the development team? How is the process organized?
There are about 30 people in the development department. They are included in six functional teams: DEV-ops, Backend, Payment-Backend, CRM, Web, and App. At the moment, we are united in a common cross-functional team with one daily meeting, although technically each functional team has its own sprint, within which they work. We switched to this format in order to be able to quickly perform product tasks and maintain general communication among all team members. Despite the fact that my specialization is mobile applications, I conduct the general “daily”. I focus the guys on the necessary tasks and try to prevent “tasks” from hanging and releases from being postponed.
We work according to the Scrum methodology with two-week sprints, but over time we decided to adapt it to our project. We can replay the sprint if the product needs to test a hypothesis or quickly deploy – this makes us more maneuverable. It is also important to understand that people and interactions are more important than processes, and the reaction to any changes is sometimes more important than following the plan.
Do you have your own style, your own habits in your work?
I am a link between business and development. As a rule, the business does not know how to implement a particular task and what resources are needed for this. At the same time, developers do not understand business requests and do not imagine how to optimally solve them. Here you have to help both sides: suggest solutions to the business and assess the complexity of implementation, and convey to the developers how we perform the task and what is important to the company.
To understand both, you need experience. I have been in IT since 2010, and during this time I have worked in various companies where I gained the necessary skills in organizing the workflow and managing teams. The atmosphere in the team is important to me, but not to the detriment of efficiency. I am a supporter of a hybrid management style, in which flexibility is important in order to quickly respond to changes, as well as involve the team in the decision-making process.
The company won the World Blockchain Summit Dubai award in the Best ICO of AWARD 2022 nomination. Is this your merit, and what does this victory mean to you?
Yes, we participated in the blockchain summit and the crypto community showed great interest in the product. But to get this award, we had to put in a lot of effort. The summit was held in March 2022. We had a planned release of applications in April, and it was impossible to make it to this event. We really wanted to show the product to the public right at the summit, so I worked out options on how to do this. There were two problems. The first is how to manage to prepare application builds that we will show at the summit. It was required to solve many tasks in a short time. The team went to meet us, we worked without days off, finalizing the necessary functionality for the summit. The second task was the difficulty of delivering applications to the phones of visitors of the summit, bypassing the App Store and Google Play. It was important for us that visitors get acquainted with the product on their smartphones, although the applications were not yet available for download through the markets. Everything was simple with Android: we uploaded the apk file to the server and made it available via a QR code. But with iOS, we had to tinker. To do this, we prepared a build of the application in advance, passed a separate review in Apple TestFlight, and only after receiving approval, published a public beta test, available via a direct link. The biggest difficulty was to pass the review from Apple on time and configure everything correctly, since any flaw would throw us back to the starting point.
There was only one attempt for Apple to approve the application. Everything worked out – visitors installed applications and actively studied our product. The jury highly appreciated the technological solutions, and we received a prestigious award for the technology of mass implementation of blockchain in a social product and for combining web2 and web3 together. For me, this means a lot: we are making an interesting product that was appreciated by both experts and visitors.
Paysenger has launched its NFT marketplace. Tell us more about it.
Yes, we have our own NFT marketplace, but in addition to this, we have our own token, which every user of the platform can receive. It seems to me that this topic is much more interesting. Any user receives rewards in the form of a real token that is traded on exchanges for simple activities on the platform. These activities include creating posts, comments, and even simple likes. For this, we have a special reward system and separate reward pools for distribution among users. The more interesting the publications, the more tokens their creators receive. In other words, we reward for activities with real tokens that can be sold on crypto exchanges.
Roman, what goals do you set for yourself?
My goal is to make the best product for influencers and their audience, to organize a space where they will create new content, exchange experiences, and make the world brighter.