Gregory Grin describes in this two part series his surprising and (sometimes funny) experiences being engineering director at local.ch.

It’s a common belief that one human year is equal to seven dog years and that one year in the web business universe is a dog year. That’s true that time flies in this very dynamic market. It could also just be that time flies when you are having fun…

Anyway, time flies here and I can’t believe that I joined local.ch already seven one year ago. And, as a disciplined fellow committed to agile software development, I can’t resist to do a retrospective.

This is why I decided to join local.ch one year ago:

I strongly believe that whatever the business you are in is, you may have the best technology, the best financial back-up, but if you only stay focused on growth numbers on your colorful management dashboard, you will fail. The impact you will have on your market will be limited.

Making an impact is about:

• people sharing the same values
• welcoming diversity
• developing great ideas thanks to a mix of experiences
• expertise
• histories
• cultures
• opinions
• and (last but not least) happy people

You can go to any leadership education, but that will not help you if you don’t love people, stand for your values and welcome diversity. So I wanted to join a company that recognizes and is committed to that.

After having been interviewed by more or less half of the team, some lunches, a party and six hours around the lake of Zürich on a boat with company executives, I decided to join.

So, here are my retrospective thoughts 12 months after my first days as Engineering Director at local.ch:

1. I can tell you where to find the nearest public toilets

Local search is a fascinating market. Online search is the preferred method for information about local businesses and it even became a commodity to a certain extent. Search engines like local.ch must now pay attention to keep their promises and ensure a decent service level to very large audiences. We are facing all the interesting challenges of a very exposed service like high-scalability and availability.

On the other hand, new local search needs and opportunities are emerging, like:

• better search experience
• new bridges with social networks
• smart personalization
• more visibility and more reach to businesses

The increasing usage of mobile phones opened a new universe of use cases for local search, on-the-go. With a mobile device in your hand, local search is the must have application. Everything is to be built on that front, we have to keep on innovating and continuously enable our users to easily find near, useful and relevant places while they are on-the-go.

2. Domenech messed up in team building, not local.ch…

Having exciting business challenges ahead of you is a great thing. Facing them in team and preparing the team to face them collegially is a critical success factor. True teamwork requires commitment, ownership, heart, creativity, flexibility, accountability, collaboration, trust, and some fun.

At local.ch, we are serious about that. Engineers are not just producing code. Each of us brings his point of view and experience in the stories we write and develop in interdisciplinary teams. In local.ch, we ask you to be there for who you are and not only for what you can do. At local.ch, we go beyond the barriers business / engineering.

And the team really deserves it. The team rocks. Local.ch is a group of talented and committed people. They know about what they talk. And they can simply amaze you. I remember that time when we released more or less simultaneously a bunch of important improvements of the search experience on www.local.ch, our new iPhone/iPad app which became the best rated reference app in Switzerland, our BlackBerry app and the daily menus of partners’ restaurants.

This team rocks. Our teamwork rocks.

. .

3. Business as unusual

When you live in dog years, that you are both in a need and demand creation market and that your organization grows, you don’t immutably plan everything for the next five five years. Every single business day is different and full of surprises. And we need to get on with it. We need to stay lean and agile. We have been and are adapting our working culture for that. A unique agile company transformation is going on there.

Local.ch embraces agile practices. But this is not only about improved software development:

• Yes, we have been introducing Scrum and it’s now becoming a playful journey.
• Yes we are making user-centered design cohabiting with Scrum and are pioneering on that matter.
• And yes, we plan to be even more serious with extreme programming.

But all of that would be for nothing if it would not be the whole company becoming agile.

So, we have three scrums teams working in parallel and a company backlog visible in the cafeteria. It transparently indicates on what we are working on and what are the next hot topics we would like to tackle. Everybody is welcome to pitch something to add on the backlog and to scream if he disagrees with the priorities. Scrum teams demo the results of their sprint to the whole company. Everybody participates to testing releases before they go live. Everybody is part of the agile culture.

Read more about Gregorys experiences as Engineering Director in the second part of our series