What is your role at Now Book It and how long have you worked here

My role is Front End Team Lead and I have been with Now Book It for 3.5 years. In that time, I’ve seen our team grow from 5 to more than 20 people. I started off doing mostly coding, but also sharing tasks like “Quality Assurance” testing and occasional “Dev Ops”. As we grew, many of these roles were diversified with new staff and my role now has become mostly planning, code reviewing, mentoring and making architectural decisions.

What role did you do before joining the team at Now Book It?

Before Now Book It I worked as a Senior Front End Developer, mostly doing agency jobs, where I would work with small teams of 4 or 5 developers, plus a project manager, to build “Content Management System” websites. Each project would go for roughly 6 months to a year and required coordination between designers, off-shore front-end developers and usually 1 or 2 back-end developers. I also did some intensive flow-chart-based development for about 6 months.

How did you get started in your career?

I originally came from a Photo Retoucher / Desktop Publisher background, but while working 6 years for an architecture-based marketing agency in London in the early 2000’s, was able to explore Adobe Flash and gradually migrated towards this, eventually becoming a full-time Actionscript + Front End Developer.

What is your favourite part of working at Now Book It?

There are plenty of things I like about working at Now Book It, but the product itself I would have to say is my favourite. When you work different agency jobs you often move from product to product and most of the time you don’t have a natural affinity to the content. I use Now Book It all the time though, when booking dinner out with friends and family, and it is rewarding to see our work out there being used by all manner of people. I have built some solid work relationships with my colleagues in my time here too, which makes the day-to-day working life easier and more dependable.

What does your typical day look like in your role at Now Book It?

Our development team works in 3 week “sprints”, which we pre-plan and try to give realistic targets for, assigning everyone in the team their tasks at the beginning. Each morning we have “stand ups”, where we all gather on a group MS Teams meeting and discuss yesterday’s and today’s work, which gives everyone a chance to collaborate collectively. The work varies each day, but is a mixture of peer code reviewing, assisting with any issues developers or testers are having, and planning for the next sprint.

How do you describe the culture at Now Book It?

The culture at Now Book It is fast-paced and very collaborative. We share responsibilities as much as possible, have daily “Stand up” meetings, group chats for common communications and every 3 weeks have a “Retrospective” meeting for everyone to voice any concerns and discuss it with the team. Our team members come from many different cultural backgrounds and work remotely in Sydney, Melbourne, Perth, Brisbane, Adelaide, Vietnam and Japan. While most of our staff enjoy the benefits of working from home, we encourage staff that live in the same cities to meet face-to-face occasionally and have small offices set up for them in Sydney, Perth and Melbourne.

What is the most interesting project you’ve worked on here?

The most interesting project I have worked on so far is definitely the upcoming mobile version of the “Restaurant Diary”. We have had design agencies involved from the beginning and have incorporated it into our incremental rebuild, with a more modern interface and front-end architecture. Many of the same components will be reused between the mobile and desktop versions of the app. The work has been split up amongst the front-end team, which has been logistically challenging, but I’ve enjoyed organising it and watching it come together.

How do you define success in your current role?

A successful outcome in my role is to have a product completed within the estimated timeframe and not have staff overworked. Poor estimates lead to unhappy stakeholders and stressed-out staff and, while unforeseen obstacles are a commonplace in our industry, regular revisiting of roadmaps helps to keep future visibility as realistic as possible. We occasionally may have to do overtime for emergencies, but making this a regular event just leads to poor work/life balance and you will end up losing staff in the long run and having to spend more time training up new people if this happens too often.

What makes Now Book It different than other organisations you’ve work for?

I have been working partly from home and part in the office for most of the last 10 years, but in most jobs I’ve had it was very much office-based for the majority of the staff there. At Now Book It this is not only standard to work partly from home, but most staff work 100% remotely. Aside from this I find the managers very open for discussion and feedback is welcomed. Customer feedback is also picked up, assessed and acted upon quickly too, when required.

What advice would you give to someone wanting to join our company?

We are continuously growing and have a lot of work to get through. Talented new staff that work hard and like to solve problems are always welcome.