My Favourite Project

I started interviewing earlier this week and, during the hiring manager call with one company, I was asked a question that I thought should make the object of a post.

"What's the project you're most proud of?"

It got me thinking. Thankfully I have a bit of experience under my belt so I have a few projects to pick from.

There are projects where I have accomplished great things individually. There are projects where, alongside my teammates, we gracefully crossed the finish line together.

But I think one project stands out. I'll take the scenic route to detail it. Hang in there.

When I was interviewing with Moonfare at the end of 2019, the HOP at the time was picking my brain about a product the company was contemplating launching. It was called the Secondary Market. It was meant to be a safety net for the existing customers, a way for Moonfare's clients to achieve liquidity should they need it.

Fast forward about one year. I'm leading the Inventory team. Fresh faces all around, the dev with the longest tenure had been with the company for about 3 months. I was new to the team domain, having been with an Operations team prior. The product manager was new as well. Thinking about the lifecycle of a team, we were just forming. Although we were trying, we were rigid.

All of a sudden, we get the news that we need to start working on the Secondary Market product. We had 6 months at most to deliver it. It hit us a bit because we didn't get much of a heads up. The PM had to scramble to do the research. The dev team had to scramble to do the technical discovery and architecture. We didn't have any time to wait for the design work to be finished, so we had to work based on wireframes.

It seemed like a tall order in the beginning, but we quickly realised that the urgency and the uncertainty had nothing on us. The PM, somehow, delivered picture perfect specs and wireframes in a ridiculously short amount of time. The dev team pulled through with the tech specs, the DB schema, and the micro-service boilerplate. In less than 3 weeks, we were writing features.

We finished the new product in the allotted time frame. With less than 6 bugs. It was a fantastic achievement. And it took the entire village. Everybody worked across the SDLC cycle. Devs and QA participated in elaborating the requirements. Devs and product participated in testing the product. And we made it just in time to launch the Secondary window in September.

But, to me, the best part is how it brought the team together. It was a journey of self-discovery and growing together. We were no longer rigid, instead we were helping one another, we enjoyed each other and we were having fun. We had become a unit, there was no self and everybody was pulling in the same direction. We had achieved synergy. And we formed bonds that lasted beyond the employment with Moonfare.