I am out

Yes, I’m out, too. After over thirteen years at XING. What. A. Ride! Grab a coffee, this deserves a longer-than-usual goodbye post.

Back then in 2011, StudiVZ was dying, and almost everybody questioned my job choice. Thanks to Jochen Kramer for coaching me before the interview, explaining the XING culture and giving me confidence that this is the right fit. And thanks to Alexander Greim for hiring me and being my boss for the first 10 years.

📱 XING iOS App

We built and grew the XING iOS app from an agency-built dumpster fire to the most used contact point for the XING B2C brand. In just a few years, we built a great XING Mobile Team. The most fun team I ever worked with. Sorry, other teams. Despite building 3 products with the mobile web app, Android and iOS native apps, there was healthy competition and high respect for the others’ work. We helped each other when we broke the live environment again and celebrated our successes together.

Many engineers opposed native apps in the early years. Distributing software via app stores was wrong and archaic, killing the open web. The programming language Objective-C with all these brackets, really? With HTML5 just around the corner, it was also a totally useless effort to build this. The web would catch up anyway, and soon.

Turns out, there’s a difference between the most beautiful technology and what customers like to use. After years building frontend technologies, it’s still hard to explain why the web has such a cool tech stack yet makes it really hard to build beautiful products. But no flamewar today, please.

Also, it turned out it wasn’t a zero-sum game with only one winner. Mobile took the brand to places it could not go before. Mobile traffic peaks are usually right in the morning, in bed, at the breakfast table, during commute. The biggest peak is in the evening, on the couch, where you might be reading this post. A desktop experience couldn’t reach most users there. We extended the interaction time with the social network XING, benefiting the whole product.

🎨 XING Design System

Both my kids were born while I worked at XING. I couldn’t have picked a better employer for this time. Taking 6 months and then two years later 8 months of parental leave to share the care work with my wife? Coming back part-time after that? As a team leader? This was all not a problem at XING in 2016.

Fast forward to today, even 9 years later this feels like science fiction and voodoo and witchery altogether for most companies in Germany. While it’s gotten better for individual contributor roles, for leadership roles it’s still the simplest method to terminate even the most promising interviews: Just ask for part-time options. Try it if you want to get out of one early. It’s a topic for another post, but it illustrates the limited understanding of leadership in Germany where the leader is judged by the hours he contributes.

The design system team was a great chance to leave my iOS bubble and understand web and Android better. It was also my first leadership experience leading people on a technology they understand more than I. While this was scary at first, jumping over that cliff helped me become a more flexible leader. I could sense the team’s needs and adapt my style.

The promise of a design system is to hide platform differences and complexities, allowing a feature team to design once and build on all platforms easily. From a brand perspective, a strong corporate design and identity (CI & CD) are essential to stand out in the social media jungle.

Building this internal service team for all XING teams was fulfilling, despite more internal communication and stakeholder management than I would have ever expected. Creating consistency and a clear brand means fewer choices and less custom solutions. I hope nobody is still grumpy at me for some unpopular decisions back then.

🧮 XING Data Team

After ensuring each UI element, like a job recommendation, looked and felt the best it possibly could for years, the data team was a welcome break. Learning what made a recommendation climb to the top position was astonishing and underwhelming at the same time. There are no magic tricks in Data Science, just very solid engineering. I added more leadership styles to my skill set, including my favorite “I have no friggin idea what you’re doing, but keep explaining.“

🤔 What’s next?

So what’s next? I’m not looking for a new team yet. I have a few experiments planned, that I feel I need to do in the next months. Like my first weekly newsletter. Subscribe to the Liquid Engineer. It’s about how new technology hypes are born in general and 3D printing in specific. Your last chance to be someone who liked 3D printing before it was cool! 😎

I’m open for lunch or beers, just ping me!