our growing eve development team goes from strength to strength

Resellers and customers of our popular cloud phone system are feeling the benefit, as new features are coming in thick and fast. The eve development team consistently delivers, and they’re showing no signs of slowing down.

In this blog our favourite Software Development Director, Marcus Hunt, talks with pride about the talented eve development team and their unwavering ambition to bring something truly brilliant to the channel.

Marcus shares his secret to fast and frequent feature development and reflects on how encouraging creativity and being a good listener brings out the best in people.

what’s your secret to fast and frequent feature releases?

Our ‘little and often’ approach means the eve development team can release a constant flow of new features, which our resellers and their customers love.

In the old days, we had 20 or more developers working together on a single project. That was pretty inefficient – at one stage, the answer was to just throw resource at it.

how do you get the best from the eve development team?

I’ve always tried to nurture my team’s curiosity and encourage them to be experimental every day.

As a leader, your most important job is to allow people to be heard. I love it when someone in the team says “I’ve got an idea”, or “I’ve learned something new”.

By placing a real emphasis on listening rather than dictating, we’ve created a healthy, collaborative environment where our eve developers are free to do brilliant work.

As an entire management team, we empower our people by giving them autonomy and by encouraging them to take ownership. This creates freedom and trust, which in turn breeds ambition and big, creative thinking.

This approach has left us in an incredibly strong position in terms of eve development, and our future as a business.

in such a big team, how are decisions about the technology roadmap made?

Having someone visionary like Ollie, who can take a creative and pragmatic view of all of that, is incredibly powerful.

what’s your one big lesson?

I love the story about the janitor who put a man on the moon.

This taught me that brilliant leaders give their people clear purpose and big vision. They encourage their team to own their part in the story. They show everyone how they contribute, and why that contribution matters.

how do you attract the best talent?

We’re not just here to be average and to do average work. We want to challenge one another, challenge the industry, and to be better. So, it stands to reason that we take recruitment pretty seriously!

Five or six years ago, we changed the way we recruited. We started hiring against our values, which are to contribute, be exceptional, believe in teamwork, act with integrity, and play well with others.

Essentially, we look for people who want to take ownership of their role. We work hard to find developers who understand their place in the grand scheme of things. We’re drawn to people who want to be part of a positive team, where we can enjoy working together and share big ambitions when it comes to eve’s development.

Teamwork has always been close to who I am. I think it’s impossible to truly deliver, without being part of a strong team.

We attract people who fit with the way we want to work and both parties are clear on that from day one, because culture is a two-way street.

how do you make sure you have a strong mix of skills in the eve development team?

We’ve only employed one developer who has a background in telecoms, almost everyone else has come from unique industries. I see that as a real strength, we don’t suffer from tunnel vision.

We have a more diverse team than ever before in terms of culture, ethnicity and gender. That feels like a good place to be because it means our team is representative of our wider community, we’re growing and we aren’t set in our ways.

Having a team with different perspectives, experiences, and backgrounds means we’re better at problem-solving, and we’re able to create more innovative solutions.

These days we approach problems and opportunities from lots of different angles, which gives us more creative and effective solutions.

It’s great to have a mix of views, and we encourage everyone to have their opinion.

what’s your background?

I’ve been with eve Wholesale in one way or another since 1999.

I started my time here in a company called DataFlow, which was acquired in 2011 by the guy who created eve Wholesale. A lot has happened since then!

At Dataflow we managed billing for resellers. We grew our team to over 60 people and created clever technology that simplified the way telecom services were billed forever.

Those were different times – bills were printed and posted to customers, the Post Office loved us! We’d show up with huge sacks of letters.

That billing expertise is still strong within our team today, but we’ve moved on a long way from being the postie’s best friend.

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