Tag: ecomengine

Home One: Mon Calamari Star Cruiser

Home One is one of the most celebrated capital ships of the Rebel Alliance. Just as Home One is the headquarters for rebels, eComEngine is the company I work for. This is a backstory to provide context for my blog.

Great stories usually have compelling backstories. We met Darth Vader on the first Star Wars movies and then we got to know how he was Anakin Skywalker before he turned to the Dark Side on the prequel trilogy. For Lord of the Rings there was The Hobbit. For Monsters Inc there was Monsters University.

My own photo of a page on DK’s Ultimate Star Wars book.

I have a great story to tell you but I don’t have the cult following which Star Wars or LOTR have. To make you interested in my story I need to share with you my backstory first.

I currently work as an Agile Team Coach for eComEngine. We develop software tools on the cloud for Amazon Sellers to help them with feedback management, restocking for their FBA inventory, and product intelligence.

Like any SAAS company, eComEngine has the following departments; IT, Product Management, Customer Service, Sales and Marketing. All of us work from home. We’re a distributed workforce scattered around the world. We don’t have a head office or any branch offices. Heck we don’t even have a rented space where we can physically meet everyday! We all collaborate online. And it works for us! We rely on various tools to communicate and work with one another: GoTo Meeting, Slack, Skype, Gmail, LeanKit, GroupMap, etc.

FB5-Historical-Infographic7

The only time I see my teammates in person is when we have our annual company outing in the Philippines. I have yet to see my colleagues from other countries in person. The dev team members in the Philippines would occasionally have meet-ups so we can have lunch or dinner together but that happens only once every six months or so.

I work with three development teams. Each team usually have a Product Owner, Product Managers/BAs, developers, QA and an Agile Team Coach.  Our products each have a dedicated dev team.  Our overlap hours is from 8 am – 2 pm US Eastern Time, that means for us in the Philippines we work from 8 pm – 2 am.

Still with me? Now you can think of the many complexities and challenges we encounter as we work with one another. I want to share with you stories about how we face these challenges and succeed in being Agile.

Thank you for reading. May the Force be with you.