Built by Humans - Stop Managing. Start Leading. | Zhenya Rozinskiy, Giorgos Ampavis

Zhenya Rozinskiy Hello, thank you for joining this episode of Built by Humans. It's a podcast where we talk about the human side of software development and product development. We all know there are lots of tools and technologies, and people like to talk about them. But at the end of the day, it is still people.

It is still the same human beings who were there a week ago, a year ago, or 10 years ago, and who will still be there tomorrow. That is what we talk about. How do we all work together? How do we communicate?

How do we manage projects and all the fun stuff? Please introduce yourself. Giorgos Ampavis Cool. Hi, Zhenya.

Thanks for having me here. My name is Giorgos. I come from Greece, and I live in London, UK. I am a product engineer with more than 21 or 22 years of experience.

For the last seven or eight years, I have been in senior leadership roles. I have worked as an engineering leader and a product engineering leader in fintech. I worked at Tide and was a very early employee there. Tide is a financial services platform in London.

I joined as an iOS engineer as the 25th employee, and I left when Tide had grown to around 2,200 or 2,300 people, with close to 500 people in engineering. Then I worked at a bank as a VP of Engineering and CTPO. Since last year, I have been operating as a fractional technologist, and I now have my own clients. Zhenya Rozinskiy Awesome.

You are from Greece, and you moved to London, or the UK. This podcast is obviously a fun project. It is something I do because I think it is important and fun. My main business is running a company called Mirigos.

We are a team augmentation and staff augmentation company. We help companies hire really strong software engineers internationally. All of our hiring is done in Europe and Latin America. Those are the two regions we focus on.

We actually started in Europe. That was our only region for many years, and then we expanded into Latin America for obvious reasons, such as the time difference and proximity to US clients. A lot of our clients are in the US. One thing we always see, and it is getting better, which I really like, is the effect of different cultures.

The US is a huge country, and most people are used to working with people from the same country. Culture is somewhat taken for granted. It is an immigrant country, so people come from all over the world, but at the end of the day, they all come, or used to come, to the same office. Then everybody went remote.

Today, a remote team might have one person from Brazil, another from Argentina, and a third from Poland. That is the team. Europe is much more mixed, and there are major cultural differences. Northern Europe and Southern Europe are different.

Greece is very different from the UK, Poland, or Spain. How do you work across all these different cultures? The four-hour siesta in Spain does not exist in the UK. How does it work?

Giorgos Ampavis I will start with the last thing you said because everybody thinks that, for example, we have siestas in Greece as well. That is a myth. It does not actually happen. In Greece, people work some of the longest hours in Europe, so I would not say that is true.

I started working in Athens, Greece, a long time ago. Back in the 1990s, Athens was not very multicultural. The cultural differences we experienced were between northern and southern Greece. The islands were considered a different culture.

We were not used to working with foreigners. When I first came to the UK around 2003, it took me a while to get used to the fact that not everybody understood me. I do not mean my language. I mean my humor and sarcasm.

They are different. It took me a couple of years to get used to it, but then I adapted. I started working in London, which is an extremely multicultural city, and you never go back because you become used to it. All the companies I have worked for since then in the UK and London have been very multicultural for the reasons you mentioned.

I do not think about it that way anymore. It would probably feel awkward if I joined a company where everybody was from the same place. For me, it is very natural, but you need to learn how to interact, or sometimes how not to interact, in certain ways. Zhenya Rozinskiy You moved to the UK, and over time, you became British.

You became someone who lives in the UK. The culture is now international. But I am sure you still work with people who are remote. One of the challenges we see is management.

I have been managing people for more than 30 years. As managers, we expect certain behaviors and standards, but sometimes we do not communicate what those expectations are. For example, I am in the office from nine to five, so I expect you to be in the office, or at least working, from nine to five. Someone else might work for a few hours, take a three-hour break, and then come back and work again.

That does not make them less productive. It does not mean they work fewer hours. It is simply a different working style. We also see differences in commitment and disagreement, especially between Latin America and Europe.

In Latin America, people are more likely to say, “Yes, I think I can get this done. Tell me what to do.” In Europe, especially Eastern Europe, they are going to argue with you. They are going to tell you that your decision is wrong, and then they may go and do their own thing.

You might say, “That is not what I wanted,” or, “That is not how I wanted it done.” It might still be what you wanted, but not how you expected it to be done. How do you work that out as a manager, technologist, or advisor? You work with all these different companies, so you must run into this all the time.

Giorgos Ampavis The two things you mentioned both fall under ways of working for me. As a manager, I do not focus on when somebody is working or where they are working from. I like coming to the office myself, and there is obviously a lot of value in face-to-face collaboration. But it is almost impossible to have everybody in the same place these days because there will always be somebody who is in another country or working from home.

You need to learn not to focus on outputs. You should focus on the outcomes people produce. When you focus on outcomes, there is less need to micromanage. People should be held accountable for delivering those outcomes.

Yes, people will sometimes miss deadlines. Things will always happen. The way I manage is by setting expectations around my working style and what I expect. The main thing is commitment.

When you say you are going to do something, do it. When something goes wrong and you cannot deliver, let the people who need to know know as early as possible. Then we can decide what else we can do to course-correct because things will go wrong in software development. That is the one thing that does not change.

There are always unknown unknowns. I like to focus on outcomes rather than outputs, and I do not care where people are. However, all companies have policies. We need some overlap, especially when we are talking about time zones.

Companies tend to set policies, and if the company has a policy, we need to follow it. It is not up to the manager to do something different. Zhenya Rozinskiy Yes, absolutely. Policies are important.

Expectations are important. Giorgos Ampavis There is some lenience, of course. You do not always go by the book dogmatically. There will be exceptions, but they have to remain exceptions.

The other thing is how you reach agreement. You are right. Some countries say yes to everything. I am from the Balkans.

I am Greek, so I was notorious for never committing to something if I did not understand everything I needed to do because I wanted to protect myself. For me, communication is key. Clarity and communication between teams and team members are essential. I like arguments.

I like people pushing back, but I do not like opinions that are just opinions. I like opinions backed by evidence and data. If you want to challenge my opinion, I am more than happy for you to do it, but you need to come with some data. Zhenya Rozinskiy Data-based, exactly.

Giorgos Ampavis I would not use hierarchy unless somebody was being unreasonable. Zhenya Rozinskiy That is interesting. You mentioned argument. I am originally from Eastern Europe.

I was born in Ukraine, but I have lived in the US for 35 years. I encourage argument and discussion. I do not know if I even want to call it argument, although it is. It is discussion.

Giorgos Ampavis Conflict. Healthy conflict. Zhenya Rozinskiy Conflict, yes. Healthy conflict is good.

I remember working as a VP at one company. We hired a new director who reported to me. We were in management meetings with four or five directors sitting around the table and talking. This new person said yes to everything, while everybody else argued with me.

After one meeting, he went to one of the people who had worked for me for a long time and said, “I do not understand this. You are all arguing with him, and he seems to enjoy it. I agree with him, and he seems to ignore me.” The other person said, “If he wanted you to agree, he would not ask you a question.

He can agree with himself. What is the point?” The whole idea is discussion. Let us come up with the best decision.

My decision is not necessarily the best one. It is an opinion. I think it is the right way to do it, but tell me if I am wrong, and I am happy to change. Let us talk a bit about hiring.

What do you pay attention to? I do not know whether that changed in a remote world for you, but when you are hiring and interviewing somebody, what is important? Giorgos Ampavis Obviously, the skills, what we call hard skills. If you are hiring a software engineer, can they actually do the job?

That is something we definitely need to know. However, people come in different shapes and sizes, and so does talent. I have hired people who did not meet all of my technical criteria, but they were very talented and promising. Yes, there was a risk when I hired them, but it paid off.

The one thing I will never bend on is behavior, what we call soft skills, because those are the difficult things to change. I will give you an example. There was a person who interviewed with me. I was observing the interview.

It was with him and two of my senior engineers. They were doing a system design exercise. He was being quite disrespectful to my team members. He was probably technically stronger than them, but he was shutting them down.

He was a very good fit at the technical level, probably beyond my expectations, but he was far below expectations on the behavioral side. We did not hire him. I stopped the interview, thanked him, and ended it. Respect is very important to me.

There are a few other things that go with it, such as knowing how to collaborate and knowing how to communicate. You cannot hire somebody who does not want to speak with others or collaborate. Zhenya Rozinskiy I am very glad you are saying this. I think it is incredibly important.

I am the same way. It seems like we finished the same people management school. Giorgos Ampavis It is actually leadership, not management. This is leadership.

Zhenya Rozinskiy It is, but it is also both. Management is how you do things. Leadership is what you naturally are. I do not know whether leadership can be learned.

Do you think someone can learn to become a leader, or is it natural behavior? Giorgos Ampavis I think you can learn to become a better leader. I am not sure, but I think leadership exists within everyone. It is about how you express your leadership style.

Management is a role. Leadership is not a role. Zhenya Rozinskiy You can be a leader without being a manager, and you can be a manager and be a horrible leader. Giorgos Ampavis Actually, the best leaders are not managers.

Zhenya Rozinskiy True. Early in my career, when I worked in larger companies and corporate environments, I saw companies take their best engineer and promote them to manager, even though that person was not a leader. They killed two positions. They lost their best engineer, and they did not gain a good manager.

Giorgos Ampavis Yes, that still happens a lot. I know companies that do it. I know companies that did it overnight, and it was a disaster because they demotivated everyone and put people into positions they did not want. Zhenya Rozinskiy Absolutely.

We conduct hundreds of interviews a month, so we see this all the time. Many companies focus on specific technical skills instead of ability, personality, and fit. At Mirigos, our model is to help clients find the right fit, not only the right technical skills. Obviously, we find people with the right technical skills.

That part is expected. But we focus on the right fit. Someone may not know the exact technology you use, but they may have proven that they can learn many different things. You can see that they think correctly, their logic is strong, and they have the ability.

They will learn. But if somebody is not a fit for your team, as in the example you gave, that is not going to change. Giorgos Ampavis Exactly. It also depends on the urgency.

Why are you hiring that person, and why are you hiring for that role? Sometimes you do not have the luxury of waiting for somebody to develop. You need them to be ready. I have hired both ways.

Sometimes I needed a specific skill immediately. I needed someone who could hit the ground running. But I have also hired people who did not even know the tech stack and gave them the opportunity to migrate to the tech stack we used. Zhenya Rozinskiy Going back to interviews, you obviously have a lot of experience doing this.

What do you focus on? It is easy to interview for technical skills. You can ask questions, have people code in front of you, and do many other things. But how do you understand their personality?

How do you find out whether they are the right fit? What do you do? Giorgos Ampavis That is the tricky part. How do you interview for behavior, especially when you are interviewing remotely?

You see it through interactions. That is why I do not like having one person conduct the interview. The interview process needs to be lean because you need to hire someone quickly. You cannot put someone through ten interview stages and hope they do not get bored or get hired by someone else.

You need the right balance. You invite somebody to an interview, remotely or face to face, and put them in front of a couple of people, not just one. You conduct a proper technical interview. For me, the technical interview was never only about the programming language.

For example, when I was working with iOS, it was never only about Swift. We asked Swift questions, but it was more about whether the person could actually work with us. We might do a refactoring exercise together. Through that, you get two things at once.

You see how the person thinks technically, but you also see how they collaborate with others. That is what happened in the example I gave earlier. I had two people interviewing that candidate. I happened to be there because I had some free time and wanted to meet him.

Usually, interviews are handled by a couple of people from my team whom I trust and who understand the behaviors we are looking for. They interview together. If it is a senior role, there may be another step, such as system design, with mostly the same approach. At the end, the candidate meets me.

Depending on the size of the company and how busy I am, I try to meet every candidate for at least 30 minutes. It is not necessarily another interview. It is a meeting. Obviously, that does not scale in a company like Tide, where we eventually had 500 engineers.

I could not interview everyone. But I had direct reports and colleagues whom I had coached and who understood our culture. They did that for me. In a smaller organization, I try to meet every person because I want to make sure we hire for cultural fit.

Cultural fit does not mean I hire people who are identical to me. No company should have multiple versions of me. It means hiring people who share the same values, including the company’s values and my values as a manager. Zhenya Rozinskiy A lot of it is shared values.

The company hired us because we share the company’s values, and then we hire people who share those values overall, ideally. I agree with you completely. For example, when we hire internally, I am always the first person to interview, not the last. I am the one who can quickly say, “No, this person is not a fit.

” I do not want to waste anybody else’s time. Even when interviews were in person, back in the day, people would come in and meet four or five people, with 30-minute interviews one after another. I would always be the first person because I had the authority to end the process after 30 minutes and say, “This is not going to work. Thank you very much.

Thanks for coming.” I did not want to waste the candidate’s time or my team’s time. I would rather be direct than create false expectations and waste everyone’s time. You have tremendous experience with distributed teams, multicultural teams, and hiring the right kinds of people for the right reasons.

What is your recommendation for somebody who is just getting into it? Maybe they are a first-time or second-time manager, and now they are running an international team. Everybody is remote, and nobody is in the office. What would you recommend?

Giorgos Ampavis There are a couple of things I did not do early in my career that I later learned to do. I would have been better off if somebody had told me. Learn how to be a good listener. Do not rush to judge people before listening to them.

Especially in a multicultural environment, it is easy to misunderstand each other and make assumptions. People default to proximity. They take sides easily. I have seen people take the side of those who are closer to them and fail to be fair to people who are farther away.

My advice is to learn to listen and treat everybody the same. Do not let location or culture make you see people differently. At Tide, we had offices and people working everywhere. One of the values we had, and probably the one I loved most, was that we did not treat anybody as different.

Even contractors who worked for us were treated as equals. We did not exclude them from decision-making or limit the projects they could choose or work on. We did not treat them separately. That is how you create a culture where everybody is equal and behaves as one team.

The other thing is learning to provide clarity. I see this with my clients and the companies I work with. A lack of clarity is one of the biggest things killing productivity. People often are not clear about what they are working on or why they are working on it.

Then they cannot deliver effectively on how to do it. Zhenya Rozinskiy Our whole business is based on long-term work. We do not do short-term contracts. We are not an outsourcing company.

We are not set up for someone who needs a person for one month, two months, or even three months. That is not what we do. We focus on long-term relationships. One of the things we always teach people and provide feedback on is this: just because somebody is a contractor, treat them the same way you would treat a regular employee.

Just because somebody is remote does not mean they are less capable than somebody sitting next to you. The financial arrangement should be completely separate from how you treat them on a project and within the team. Many people understand this, and it is getting better and better. Some still do not.

Giorgos Ampavis Even the small things matter. I once saw a client exclude all contractors from company emails. Anything happening within the company was invisible to contractors and consultants. They had no insight into what was happening.

It might sound like a small thing, but it is not small to that person. This is how you create loyalty. Zhenya Rozinskiy A lot of people ask us how we find such great talent because we are very good at finding great people. Our secret sauce is not really a secret.

We used to hire primarily from Eastern Europe. Now it is all of Europe, especially because of migration caused by the war in Ukraine. People have moved throughout Europe. We still hire many Ukrainians, but now they live in the UK, Poland, Spain, and many other countries.

We also hire people from other countries, of course. We also hire extensively from Latin America. In fact, the majority of our hiring now is in Latin America. Our competition is not another product company.

It is an outsourcing company. As people become more senior and involved, they want to matter. They want to be part of the core team and part of the decision-making. They do not want to be treated like someone who is simply told what to do.

They do not want their opinion dismissed because they are a contractor, because they are remote, or for any other reason. What we offer candidates is the opportunity to become part of the team. They are no longer a small interchangeable resource that can be moved from project to project, told what to do, and treated as unimportant. That is exactly what you are saying.

Treat them the same way you treat every other team member. To candidates, that is incredibly important. It is probably the biggest reason they choose us over somebody else. Giorgos Ampavis Just because the business relationship is different does not mean everything else needs to be different.

Zhenya Rozinskiy Exactly. Thank you so much. I really appreciate this. It was very interesting and very helpful.

Thank you.