Inside Workleap

GSoft becomes Workleap, strengthening its commitment to bringing people and technology together to drive business excellence

After 17 years as a bootstrapped company, GSoft and its ecosystem of employee and digital experience software becomes Workleap on the heels of a CA$125M capital investment 

MONTRÉAL — June 26, 2023 — GSoft, a leading software company behind employee experience products that enable over 20,000 companies to achieve more, has officially rebranded to Workleap, as part of an important strategic move that supports its mission to craft the leading platform to make work simpler, kinder and faster.  

GSoft, now Workleap, has witnessed significant growth over the past year. This includes the launch of Softstart, a software tool that transforms employee onboarding into a vibrant, organized and efficient experience, and Talentscope, a software tool that empowers people-first teams to map their skills, develop their talents and accelerate their growth to create more engaging and productive workplaces. Earlier this year, the company further expanded its portfolio by acquiring Didacte, a learning management system (LMS) designed to build, manage and monitor employee training. This rebranding reflects the company's intent to further expand and unify its family of software products to deliver more value to its customers. With the recent announcement of a CA$125M investment from CDPQ to support growth through acquisition, Workleap is well equipped to be a long-term partner for businesses navigating the challenging world of a digitally connected workforce. 

“We started as three 20-year-olds who created an IT services company in a small apartment in Quebec. Since then, we’ve grown Workleap to more than 400 employees with a singular focus on creating simple-to-use products that elevate the work experience and drive business performance," said Simon De Baene, co-founder and CEO of Workleap. “Any business leader will tell you the past few years have been some of the most challenging when it comes to creating a quality employee experience. Workplaces need a software update to bring their full team together and create a unified experience, and Workleap can do that.” 

Work no longer takes place in an office but in the tools that companies use. Creating an employee experience that leads to higher productivity and satisfaction requires a powerful set of unified tools that make work really work. Workleap seeks to build a best-in-class ecosystem of software tools, unifying all the strengths of its existing software and adding new capabilities to create a bolder digital experience for its midsize and large business customers. 

Visit Workleap.com for more information on how the company helps employees and businesses achieve work excellence and high performance.    

## 

About Workleap  

Workleap is a software company on a mission to create products that make work simpler, kinder and faster. With over 20,000 companies in more than 100 countries as customers, we enable people to work at their best through products that improve the employee and digital experience:  

• ShareGate, a leading Microsoft 365 management solution 
• Officevibe, software designed to equip HR leaders and managers with the tools they need to drive engagement, performance, and retention 
• Softstart, software that transforms the employee onboarding into a vibrant, organized and efficient experience 
• Didacte, a learning management system (LMS) designed to build, manage and monitor employee training 

• Talentscope, software that empowers people-first teams to map their skills, develop their talents and accelerate their growth to create more engaging and productive workplaces 

The Workleap team is made up of 400 people united around a shared passion for building software that makes work really work. 

Media Contact 
Spencer Hotz
BLASTmedia for Workleap
workleap@blastmedia.com
317-806-1900 ext. 187

Source: Official press release.

A letter from our CEO, Simon De Baene 

Today marks a special day for myself and my team. It’s the start of a new era—a leap into a new, exciting venture that will enable us to change the way people work for the better.  

Allow us to reintroduce ourselves. Our name is Workleap.

Workleap is more than just a new name for GSoft. It’s the result of building best-in-class employee experience (EX) tools for the better part of two decades and realizing that they should all work together. We became humble experts in the world of work and now have what it takes to tackle it in the best way possible. 

The employee experience is often depicted as an oversimplified linear journey. The truth is it isn’t simple at all. It’s actually quite chaotic and ever-evolving. Especially at the rate the world is advancing and new needs are arising. 

Workleap may not work miracles, but it sure will bring clarity to the chaos. It’ll help companies build EX foundations at their own pace and with the right tools. By connecting people and technology, Workleap will make sure fulfilling employee journeys go hand in hand with frictionless productivity, efficiency, and impact — regardless of what your company looks like. 

And when you enable your people to work at their best, you have everything it takes to make miracles happen. 

Let’s take a trip down memory lane to understand how we got here. 

I founded GSoft 17 years ago with Guillaume Roy (GR) and Sebastien Leduc in a small Montreal apartment. We were three kids with big dreams who shared a passion for building great software.  

Before I continue, let me give a quick disclaimer: this isn’t a “rags to riches” story. Yes, we have gained a lot of success since 2006. But we did so much more than that in those 17 years. This is the story of our journey — where we started, what we learned, and what brought us to where we are today. 

We named GSoft after the famous early 2000s hip hop group, G-Unit. True story. We were big (okay, huge) fans. And being the impressionable 20-something-year-olds that we were, it seemed like a good idea at the time. 

The company was very different back then. From the beginning, we knew we wanted to bring a breath of fresh air to the world of IT. The carpets, the cubicles, and the mood were too gray for us and we wanted to change that. Plus, the solutions that were available were clunky and difficult to use. Not our style. We knew we could make IT cooler and smarter with alternatives that were more straightforward.  

So, we began our quest toward this mission as a service-led software development firm focused on building custom software for our clients. That formula worked for a while (about a decade), and we definitely learned a thing or two about making great software during that time.  

Our first major shift happened in 2009. We decided to build a product of our own, and that’s how ShareGate came to be. A few years later, Officevibe, our second child, followed suit. In 2017, we dropped the service portion of the business and focused all our energy on building, iterating, and improving our two products and brands. At this point, our hearts were set on finding a better way to work. And we did this by bridging the gap between technology and people. 

With the onset of the pandemic and the rise of hybrid work, the world of work needed a software update. Sharegate helped companies achieve more with their Microsoft 365 ecosystem. Officevibe kept a pulse on their people, helped them feel recognized, and empowered them to be productive despite the craziness going on in the world.  

This major paradigm shift in the world and the workplace meant organizations and teams had to completely rethink how to work together. They constantly faced new challenges. And we knew we could help. Innovation was always in our DNA, and we found a way to bring it back to the forefront.  

Enter the Innovation Lab: a team whose sole purpose was to innovate and build new software to meet these growing needs. And we did a lot of that. We have been hard at work for the last few years. The fruit of our labor? Softstart and Talentscope, onboarding and talent development tools, respectively.  

We recently lived yet another “first time” when we completed our acquisition for a learning management system called Didacte. It showed us that as much as we love creating things of our own, we don’t always have to start from scratch. We can spot the potential in existing tools and bring them to the next level. 

What a ride, eh? Our journey was dynamic and unpredictable, to say the least. What started as a software development company suddenly became a tech company with a portfolio of five SaaS products. They all had their own purpose in what we soon discovered was the link between all of them — employee and digital experience at work.  

Our lightbulb moment came when GR and I were brainstorming names for our latest product, the talent development tool I mentioned earlier. We thought of Workleap and instantly knew we were onto something.  

Workleap represented way more than career planning and skills development and it was too good to just keep for a single product. It stood for everything we did across the whole company. It stood for a kinder, smarter, and faster way to work.  

Can you see where I’m going here? We analyzed our product stack, looked at the bigger picture, remembered why we started doing this in the first place and realized it was time for change.  

Our future was Workleap: a unified brand, company, and ecosystem of software products that tackles the employee experience from many angles. 

We knew it was a big move, but we were certain it was the right one. Workleap is a better reflection of who we are today and where we’re headed. So here I am, reintroducing the company I built with my buddies nearly two decades ago. 

One thing is sure: we had to pass through all the trials and tribulations, victories, and learning opportunities to get to where we are today. Workleap would not be Workleap if GSoft never existed. It’s nice to take a step back and appreciate what got us here and what will allow us to take the leap forward. 

So, what does this mean for the future? 

To my team, we’ll be able to work as a more unified front. This change will set us up for success and allow us to focus on building better solutions in a more streamlined way. We’ll be primed to innovate like only we know how to. And we’ll do it faster than ever. 

To our clients, Workleap will empower you to stay nimble in a world that’s constantly testing and asking you to adapt. We’ll be your ultimate sidekick to help you navigate the digital workplace and keep your team happy, engaged, and productive. 

And to the world, we’re ready to redefine what it means to do great work. With Workleap, work will be simpler, kinder, and faster. With Workleap, work will really work. 

The journey that took us here was a heck of a ride; I truly hope my words did it justice. But this is just the beginning. We have a lot of challenges to face, lessons to learn, and victories to claim. It’s time to be laser-focused on our quest to offer a better employee experience to all and empower everyone to work at their best.

We take the leap.

Simon 

Here, we’re in the business of building simple software solutions that help companies work better, from anywhere. That's precisely why we go the extra mile to help our customers (and prospective customers, too) from A to Z, as best we can. Easy to say, but challenging nonetheless. Thankfully, we're able to count on a dream team of dedicated individuals who believe strongly in the potential of our products. Meet them

Products ready to be experienced

" I’ve been working at Workleap for going on seven years now, which makes me the veteran on the sales team. Let's just say we've grown significantly since I started in 2015.In a company like ours that builds software, the sales team is a point of contact for customers. We’re here for them when issues arise, or when they feel like running ideas by us. Essentially, our job is to offer our customers a human experience and to walk alongside them toward their goals.We’re like Sherpas in the sense that we work hand in hand with our customers to help them overcome obstacles and ultimately reach the peak. We pride ourselves on passionately understanding our products to the core; for us, it's about so much more than simply fulfilling sales targets. We're definitely not your stereotypical salespeople who push solutions without fully understanding the need for them.Plus, we’re just so proud to be building products like ours, that we want our customers to experience everything they have to offer. They don't necessarily have to go through the sales team, either. But we're here if they need us. And I think that's what sets us apart.[cta url="https://calendly.com/michaelnoiseux/cafevirtuel30?month=2022-02" title="Book a virtual chat with Mike" target="_self"]

"We pride ourselves on passionately understanding our products to the core; for us, it's about so much more than simply fulfilling sales targets."

Michael Noiseux, Business Development Director, Workleap

The Workleap touch?

• We have wonderful mentors and anyone can become one.
• We have the challenges of a startup and the budget of a large company.
• We encourage growth, so opportunities are endless.

So far in 2022, we've created roles that didn't exist before. And that means we have more people in our teams with real potential to grow and progress. This year, our goal is to give 100% of our staff additional responsibilities."" I’ve been working at Workleap for five years. We’re lucky to work with people who are always so keen to learn and grow, and since one of Workleap's core values is to precisely "take the leap," we can afford to be bold in our roles! We built a very solid foundation in 2021, so this year, we have extra wiggle room for more ambitious objectives, and those will likely take us out of our comfort zone and open up a lot of opportunities."[cta url="https://calendly.com/charles-fortinlarose/30min-meet-with-me" title="Book a virtual chat with Charles" target="_blank"]

“We’re lucky to work with people who are always so keen to learn and grow."

Charles Fortin-Larose, Account Management Director, Workleap

An ever-growing team

" I’ve been working at Workleap for almost three years now, the last one of which as a manager. I have always been one to believe that good leadership is built on the potential to help others. I see it as a springboard to support my team and help them to grow within the company, both professionally and personally. Support them in their current roles, help them find a new path, or simply encourage them to follow their ambitions, these would be my top priorities as a manager.Right now we’re 11 on the team: six Sales Development Representatives (SDR) and five Account Executives (AE). Things move quickly at Workleap and we’re currently looking to recruit additional individuals to round out the team.

“Support them in their current roles, help them find a new path, or simply encourage them to follow their ambitions, these would be my top priorities as a manager."

Stu Reider, Sales Manager, Workleap

I meet my team weekly and on top of that, I conduct regular, informal check-ins with each team member. It’s my way of taking stock of the points they want to work on, whether they be professional skills or soft skills. As I always say to the team, I will never stand in the way of growth and development. Whatever form it takes.I also meet with each SDR and AE twice a month to go over results, and I'm regularly in touch with them which helps me identify growth opportunities and/or areas requiring improvement. If someone wants to work on the way they make calls or write emails, or perhaps learn to better manage their time or boost their organizational skills, we will focus on that.The members of the sales team are happy with the work-life balance they have. Last year, each member of the team either got a promotion or took on more responsibility. For me, that’s a 10/10 and we can be proud of that.

What kinds of profiles do we look for in sales?

To be honest, ALL profiles. We’re not really interested in recruiting the same profiles all the time. But we are open to seeing things differently and continuing to grow. By hiring people who come from different backgrounds, we know that we can learn from them, and vice-versa.[cta url="https://www.gsoft.com/en/careers/revenue-team/" title="See our open vacancies on the team" target="_blank"]For example, the last person I recruited for a sales rep position had just received a degree in Cellular and Molecular Biology. She didn’t have sales experience per se, but that didn’t make her any less interesting to us. At the end of the day, all skills can be transferred with proper coaching. You don’t need to have previously sold software to work at Workleap, and several people on the team are proof of that. As a manager in a company like Workleap, I have the freedom to spend time with my wife and daughter, as I work from home and have a very flexible schedule. I’m not going to lie – our objectives are ambitious and my days are often quite intense, but no one’s ever going to expect me to work until midnight or to sacrifice my personal life for the sake of an extra sale. I’m extremely proud to be a part of Workleap."[cta url="https://www.linkedin.com/in/stureider/" title="Get to know Stu" target="_blank"]

Stronger together

" I joined Workleap in October 2020 after finishing my masters. By the end of my internship, I was working 100% as an account coordinator, but my coworker Mathilde and I really wanted to become Sales Development Representatives (SDR). We were so excited. We had no sales experience, but Workleap let us get our foot in the door and try the role on for size to see if we'd like it. We trained for six months, and they placed so much trust in us and it all went so smoothly from the very beginning.Taking part in the SDR School program helped us loads. It's a 15-week course centered on a different theme every week. It was kind of fun to break up our day to day, and go back to school for an hour or two a week. We were able to learn tons from the different sales reps from around the world, with more experience than us. We were proud to share our learnings with the team after the course.

“We had no sales experience, but Workleap let us get our foot in the door and try the role on for size to see if we'd like it."

Sandrine Lessard, Sales Development Representative, Workleap

Once settled into our sales roles, we got to coach the new recruits who were taking over our old jobs, all while being mentored by our sales rep coworkers. It’s so gratifying to learn from one another. It’s like a knowledge merry-go-round.It’s crazy to think that after two years at Workleap, I’m one of the more seasoned SDR on the team. Time flies, but at the same time, it’s super neat to have a growth trajectory in plain sight. You don’t have time to get bored and your managers really do care.

My experience at work in 3 words?

• Flexible
• Amiable, like working with the best crew
• Mutual help Iike I’ve never seen before. In sales, it’s so easy to get caught up in competition mode, like who will get the best numbers first. In our team, helping others comes naturally to us. "

[cta url="https://www.linkedin.com/in/sandrine-lessard1818/" title="Get to know Sandrine" target="_blank"]

Tools to work better

" I joined Workleap in October 2018. At the time, I had a fairly generic role as a sales specialist and today, I’m a senior account manager. With greater objectives come greater responsibilities!I truly feel that Workleap does everything in its power to set the sales team up for success: from exciting startup-like challenges to the best Stack tools a salesperson could ask for.On the team, we use traditional sales tools like a CRM, a BI service for billing and of course our trusty Outlook, among other tools for continuous improvement. With Gong, for example, we can record all our calls, and go back to them to optimize our conversations with customers and our approach to closing. Yes the feedback is important, but what really makes a difference is people's desire to keep getting better and to be open to reviewing their work. You don't see that every day.

"Sales at Workleap is about so much more than phone calls and numbers."

Raphael Bellemare, Senior Account Manager, Workleap

What makes me want to get up in the morning? The same thing that made me want to apply to the company four years ago: the people who work here and the relationships we have with our managers. If you're looking for a challenge and are wanting to build something special, I couldn't think of a better place to work. Sales at Workleap is about so much more than phone calls and numbers. "[cta url="https://www.linkedin.com/in/rapha%C3%ABl-bellemare-48304891/" title="Get to know Raphaël" target="_blank"][cta url="https://www.gsoft.com/en/job-openings/" title="Check out all our current job openings" target="_blank"]

At Workleap, we are a fully (and proudly) distributed company. What does that mean, exactly? Well, in addition to having the freedom to work from our offices or from home, our employees can choose to do so from just about anywhere in the world, 150 days a year. And it works. Here’s how.

Kimberly, technical content specialist at Workleap, found the perfect combo: work & play in Europe for 4 months, as a solo traveller. Quite the adventure!

Hi Kimberly, where are you as we speak?

Kimberly : Hi! I’m currently in Alicante, Spain. If I slightly turn my head to the left right now, I can literally see the ocean.

What made you want to travel, and why did you choose that part of the world?

Kimberly : I’ve always loved learning new languages, and Italy has consistently held a special place in my heart. So much so that I learned the language years ago and thus, speak Italian - although I must admit, I’m a bit rusty now. I’d always wanted to solo travel to Europe, so I jumped at the opportunity Workleap provides us with and came to work from Italy for a month, same in Spain and another month in Portugal. Then two last weeks split between London and Scotland. I chose my destinations really keeping in mind my needs and wants for a great summer, like proximity to the beach and mountains…and good grub of course!

What does that kind of flexibility mean to you as an employee and in general?

Kimberly : It means I can continue to build my career in Montreal, to progress and grow professionally, to enhance my personal growth as well.

I’ve had the chance to meet a lot of people who work remotely, smart working as some call it, and really connect with them and their cultures, countries, languages, and daily experiences. I’ve also come across people from the tech industry and have learned about new tools and new perspectives that I can apply to my job. It’s very enriching.

[cta url="https://www.gsoft.com/en/careers/" title="Find out how we work at GSoft" target="_blank"]

Tell us about your everyday life. Your tasks, team…the jet lag  ;)

Kimberly : I look at it this way: each place I visit is home for a month. So, in terms of my routine, nothing really changes. When I first got here, though, I did have to adapt my schedule to the 6-hour time difference. Oh, and my Microsoft Teams' background gives us plenty to talk about during team meetings ;) my coworkers are sharing my experience in a way.

Truth be told, the 6-hour time difference means I’m not able to interact with my team as much as I used to. The great thing about working with folks like the ones at Workleap is the variety of conversations we have on Slack. Whether you’re participating, facilitating or just along for the ride, it really makes you feel like you’re part of the team.

As technical content specialist at Workleap, I don’t work directly with our clients. I have requests that come in daily through Trello, and I complete them so that my coworkers have everything they need to move forward with our clients. Which I must admit is very convenient for me as a remote worker.

The pandemic was so intense that our managers at Workleap AND Workleap encourage us to disconnect every now and then and go for walks (along with plenty of other wellness activities) …my walks are that much more motivating with a view like this one.

Any anecdotes you’d like to share about your European remote work experience?

Kimberly : Like all remote workers, I think the Internet is both our best friend and our worst enemy. When you work in several different locations like I have, you realize it’s not always 100% reliable. In Italy, for example, my wifi was down for 24h, and I had to use my hotspot to get my work done. Let’s just say I paid for that day big time! That’s just the reality, though, and it’s out of our control. We adapt, we learn, we make sure it doesn’t happen again.

[cta url="https://www.gsoft.com/en/job-openings/" title="Interested in working with Kimberly?" target="_blank"]

Three tips to make the most of working abroad?

Kimberly : I would say start prepping well before you take off, and by that, I mean let your insurance and financial institutions know about your trip. In order to avoid unwelcome surprises when you get back.

And we all know how much we rely on Google Maps when we’re in a new country! So, if you never want to be without the Internet, my advice is to always have your electronic SIM card on hand. Sometimes we think that it’ll be easier to just buy a new one, but depending on where you are, that can be quite challenging to obtain. So, look into installing an eSIM directly on your mobile device, is what I would tell anyone going abroad for a long time.

Also, a company like Workleap trusts us 100%, so I think it’s essential to keep in mind that even though we do have the freedom to travel and to explore, our employer trusts us to do our best work always, whether we’re working remotely or not. There really is no difference between the two, and I think that’s something we truly need to value as employees.

Can one be productive when working from another country?

Kimberly : Yes, but productivity can vary. When you’re in “discovery” mode in another country and working at the same time, time flies. And when you try to squeeze everything in (discovery and work responsibilities), it’s easy to get distracted.

Also, for those who aren’t familiar… summer in Europe is VERY hot. Comparable to the heatwaves we get in Quebec but with a little added touch of discomfort that makes working from home challenging at times. So, my advice to you is: make sure your accommodations have AC if you’re planning on coming in the summer!

A key takeaway from your time there?

Kimberly : Working abroad, and alone to boot, really took me out of my comfort zone! I’m pleasantly surprised by how many people I’ve managed to meet (via expat groups on Facebook and the Meetup app) and connect with in different languages and across cultures (because yeah, the locals totally join us at expat events). It’s super enlightening and my goal is to continue challenging myself.

It’s true that travelling alone can be scary. Much more so as a woman (of colour in my case). I’ve learned that it’s super important to do your research when it comes to neighbourhoods and to not be afraid to ask for help when you feel you need it – regardless of the language barrier or any shyness you might feel, sometimes you just need to get creative.

What would you say to someone who’s on the fence about joining Workleap?

Kimberly : Do it! I think we got really used to our comfort during the pandemic, which of course makes it all the more complicated to take the leap and give something new a whirl.

Workleap is all about growth. Take me, for example: they trusted me and I was offered a role I wasn’t exactly qualified for. I started out on the Technical Support Team but my manager took note of my writing skills. So, I was able to transition into a technical content specialist role, initially in hybrid mode, until, little by little, I acquired the skills necessary to carry out my new tasks to the best of my ability. I then transferred teams! The training materials we have access to are invaluable to me, especially as someone who’s currently growing into a role that’s unrelated to my initial experience.

Finally, and most importantly if you ask me, is that Workleap introduced me to some lifelong friends!

[cta url="https://www.gsoft.com/en/careers/" title="We're hiring. Join the team!" target="_blank"]

When GSoft began building products 16 years ago, listening to our customers was easy. We started out with just one. Then, 100 more came along. And before we knew it, we were up to 1,000. Now, we have more than 15,000, all over the world. It’s a whole new ball game.

The subject of customer feedback is vast and fairly relatable. Because who doesn’t want to listen to their customers? At GSoft, our mission is to build products that people will love. That's part of our product-led approach: at checkout time, we want our products to stand out from the rest. And that involves building incredibly strong product experiences for our end users so that they don’t look back. To reach that level of wow, understanding them to the core is a must.Break out your boots and gloves, folks, because we’re about to dig into how to harvest and use feedback to build the best products effectively.

Harvesting

At GSoft, many people are in direct contact with our customers. Reaching out to each one individually is, as you can imagine, a daunting task. That's why it's up to our product team to determine how to best go about connecting with them.

Feedback all around...

In a product-led company like ours, any and all feedback can have an impact on the direction our products may take, whether it’s coming from a potential buyer or a customer who’s been using our products for the last five years. It’s all equally valuable.

And that’s why it’s so important to get other teams (marketing, sales, customer success, etc.) involved in the harvest and aligned when it comes to processing the information received.If you ask me, harvesting feedback requires an all-hands-on-deck mentality. I know of multiple companies that have built a so-called "Voice of the Customer" team. That may seem like a good first step to get the harvest going, but what typically ends up happening is that, by the time the product team gets their hands on the feedback, it’s already been interpreted through a single lens (sales or support).That being said, it’s not exactly easy to get the entire company to take part in the harvest. And, quite frankly, it’s not all that practical either. At GSoft, we’ve simplified the process of gathering feedback with a product management tool called Productboard.ProductBoard lets us connect to all of our existing systems (Salesforce for sales, Zendesk for support, etc.) and centralize customer conversations within a single tool for product managers.

Ask, and you shall receive

Feedback doesn’t always fall from the sky. You really have to take the time to put in place mechanisms to automate your harvest:

• Measure customer satisfaction at regular intervals (NPS) or survey users on an ad hoc basis.
• Harvest win/loss reasons (even in self-serve mode).
• Understand why your customers try your products. Or not.

“Eat your own dog food”

If you build products that your own company can use, don’t forget to harvest feedback internally as well. At GSoft, all of our employees use our product Officevibe. With a click of a button, everyone can share feedback, a bug, or a product idea directly via Slack. A feature that strikes up conversation internally is often a good indicator of what customer reactions might be like.

Processing

Now that we have loads of feedback coming in daily, the product team is faced with yet another challenge: how do we process the feedback in order to improve our products?

Build a ritual

Many product managers have never had the chance to work for a product that harvests a lot of feedback. To facilitate early adoption at GSoft, we’ve built several key rituals around the process:

• Mission “empty inbox”: the feedback is assigned to a product manager and must be processed within a maximum of 30 days.
• Monthly review: some feedback can touch on several aspects of a product and thus can’t be attributed to a single "swim lane.” Each month, the product team gets together to discuss these cases.
• Top learnings: every quarter, we compile our most memorable learnings on our products and on our customers.

Keep it simple and swift

Considering that it’s practically impossible to work on every single request at once, we aim to reduce the time it takes to process each feedback item. The processing step is a bit like a sorting centre:

• For feedback that’s clear and easy to understand, we simply create a feature (or we assign it to an existing feature).
• For feedback that’s a little more vague, we assign it to a component (or team), which allows us to track it down at a later date.

Follow up. On everything.

Sometimes, our customers share ideas with us that aren’t exactly in line with our product strategy. That’s completely normal, but just a little more challenging to process.

At GSoft, we monitor this type of feedback via a component called "Out of strategy," in our backlog. We don't want to dedicate too much time to processing it, but who knows when our strategy might change?Using concrete examples to fully understand our strategy also helps us to better align our teams and pushes our product managers to ask themselves the really important questions.

Integrating & prioritizing

Now that the dirty work is out of the way, it’s time to use the feedback to adapt the product road-map! Because at the end of the day, feedback is only as valuable as the product team’s ability to interpret it and put it in action.

Prioritize better

Customer feedback has become a tool that product managers use to prioritize more efficiently. Previously, at GSoft, we would prioritize features using the RICE model - Reach / Impact / Confidence / Effort.Now, we take a new element into consideration: the User Impact Score. The score compiles the number of feedback items we’ve received from customers, weighted by the relative importance assigned by each.

This new indicator allows us to see whether there are various users waiting in the wings for a given feature, which in turn enables our product team to launch the feature in question to those users.

Keep digging...if you must

Sometimes the feedback we harvest simply isn’t clear… or worse yet, it’s contradictory. Oh, humans!When product managers get to work on a new opportunity and run into this situation, chances are they will have to contact the customer directly and validate the solution they have in mind. This is where our research practices come in...

Set aside a budget for continuous improvement

One of the major dilemmas a product team faces is this: when to continue working on existing features and when to start fresh. As a rule, the majority of feedback received is about existing features. That's why it's so important to improve our products on a rolling basis, because why else harvest the feedback?To facilitate the decision-making process, each product “swim lane” gets its share of attention in the form of continuous improvement. Considering that all teams contribute to the harvest, changes simply have to be implemented, because if customers (or even internal teams) don’t see any improvements made based on their feedback, they’ll stop giving it.

Good people who listen

It goes without saying, but when it comes to harvesting feedback, people play a crucial role (as they do in most company matters ).

Build IRL visibility

One of the bigger challenges we come across when working on products is that of losing contact with our customers. It’s always nice to see the numbers go up: signups, MAU... but after a while, that human touch kind of vanishes.To remedy this issue, we’ve put in place a few important rituals at GSoft:

• Every month during Product News (a company-wide monthly meeting to discuss product advancements), we invite a customer to join us for 10 minutes to talk about their experience with our product (distributed work has made this so much easier).
• We always share ambassador feedback with the team on Slack. The more specific and human, the better!
• We share stories from new and renewed customers, as well as the reasons why they chose our products over the competition.

Recognize team member contributions

Harvesting feedback can be somewhat repetitive for teams who work with several dozen customers every day. So we make sure to highlight our "Top Contributors" during the monthly product meeting.

Support from the company

Over the years, I’ve realized that listening to our customers comes naturally to mostly everyone at GSoft. However, when I recruit product managers, I notice that that isn't necessarily the case at other organizations.I’ve thought about it a lot while writing this article, and I’ve realized that we’ve essentially built products with that in mind. At GSoft, one of our core values is “listening to understand,” and our business strategy directly reflects our ability to "Deep customer understanding: continuously learn and build with our customers".I remember when we were only a few product managers on the team, and we would prioritize backlogs and try to guess our customers’ most pressing needs. At the time, feedback harvesting was practically unheard of. Then little by little, we started doing research, building more organized rituals…and here we are today, all proudly listening to our customers as a team, one way or another.

At GSoft, we are a fully (and proudly) distributed company. What does that mean, exactly? Well, in addition to having the freedom to work from our offices or from home, our employees can choose to do so from just about anywhere in the world, 150 days a year. And it works. Here’s how.

When coworkers head to Ecuador

Audrée, Director of User Experience, and Élise, Director of Data & Analytics at GSoft, are a tight-knit duo. So much so that they decided to pack up and head to Ecuador together to work (and travel) for a little under a month. And guess what? They’re only just getting started.Élise: "We were looking to go somewhere different, somewhere warm and in the same time zone as Quebec, because that just makes things easier for work. Since Audrée loves bird watching, we decided that Ecuador would be the perfect destination for us!"Audrée: "We both love to travel. Work sometimes gets in the way of that, but at GSoft we're able to combine the two and keep that passion alive."

Your place looks lovely! Where are you?

Audrée: “When we first arrived, we stayed in Cuenca for a week. It’s one of the nicest cities in Ecuador. The hotel where we stayed specializes in hosting digital nomads like ourselves. We were able to make good use of their co-working space, which was lovely. Élise was super nervous about the internet not being great right up until her first meeting Monday morning . Later in the trip, we rented an Airbnb on the Pacific Ocean, again making sure to ask the hostess ahead of time about the internet speed.”

A day without slush or snow removal: tell us all about it.

Audrée: “Like any other work day, but with a few perks! I’m up before Élise, I have breakfast and I get ready for my calls. Around lunchtime, we have a quick bite and head down for a dip to take advantage of the sun, or we go buy some chocolate. With our flexible schedule, we’re able to manage our time better. If it’s overcast, for example, I can bank a few extra hours and take a sunny Friday afternoon off instead.”Élise: “Same here! I’m able to move my schedule around to make the most of our time. I worked several evenings when we first arrived so I’d have more freedom later on. As for meetings and team stuff, nothing’s changed… except that maybe our Teams backgrounds are the envy of some.”[cta url="https://www.gsoft.com/en/careers/" title="Interested in learning more about how we work at GSoft?" target="_blank"]

All the sun, swimming, activities…! Has your productivity been affected at all?

Audrée: “I was worried I’d have a hard time concentrating away from my home office, but nope! Not at all! And since it’s the two of us, we keep each other on the right track.”Élise: “I totally agree. We don’t necessarily work together every day, but I’m well aware of her reality and team, and she mine. Since we’re always together, work comes up quite a bit! Possibly more than it did back in Montreal! But it keeps us focused, even in such a different environment.”Audrée: “I can talk to Élise about any work-related issues or just stuff in general, and it keeps me focused. Travelling together really is the best of worlds: we get to socialize like we did back in the office, all while taking in everything this journey has to offer.”Élise: “I think the timing really helped, too. Quebec is going through a lot right now [lockdown in January], and I think it must be incredibly difficult to stay motivated and focused. If anything, coming to Ecuador boosted my productivity! It’s so much easier to remain engaged knowing that we have surf lessons or are visiting a new city after work!”

Any takeaways or hiccups you’d like to share for other workers?

Audrée: “I’ve loved the experience so much that there’s no going back: from now on, I’m travelling and working remotely! It’s always been a dream of mine to escape the winter. My plan is to build a house in the Costa Rican jungle, one that’s perfectly adapted to remote work, with fiber optics and an outdoor desk so I can admire the toucans while I’m working. My GSoft coworkers will be more than welcome to visit, too!”Élise: “We’re really making the most of our time here, we feel great, and it shows in our work. That might sound cheesy, but it’s true. I’ve accomplished some wonderful things since I got here; it’s very motivating. And I’ve truly appreciated doing all of this with my coworker. It’s the perfect setup for working abroad! My takeaway? That I need to do this as often as I can! I’m leaving for Copenhagen in May, and I’m already so excited!”Audrée: “As for hiccups, I would have to say losing my phone and panicking that I wouldn’t be able to access my Slack notifications. GSoft was super responsive and got me up and running on Élise’s phone in no time. I think the company knows a thing or two about remote work!”

We’ll let you get back to the sun now. Any parting words?

Élise: “I would have to say it’s been an incredibly different and rewarding experience. I feel like GSoft gave me this fabulous opportunity, and I ran with it. I’ve realized how different it is to travel when you’re also working. Our journey started as a 10-day vacation around the country – we climbed a volcano, went bird watching, and explored the Amazon rainforest! We then hunkered down and got to work, and a little routine set in. I genuinely enjoy both the work and the play – two very different experiences!”Audrée: “A revelation and an experience I’m truly grateful for. My personal situation and the flexibility of distributed work give me the kind of freedom few people have access to. Travelling is not easy, so to have the chance to work in another country or even just outside of my comfort zone, is something I’m beyond grateful for and am taking in fully.”

[cta url="https://www.gsoft.com/en/job-openings/" title="Interested in living the GSoft experience? You’re in luck, we’ve got plenty of open roles. " target="_blank"]

Don’t have anything nice to say? Say it caringly.We’ve probably all heard it before, be it as rambunctious children, opinionated teenagers, or earnest young professionals: if you don’t have anything nice to say, then don’t say anything at all. It’s often well-intentioned advice meant to keep the peace and spare people’s feelings, but according to former Google director and Apple University faculty member Kim Scott, it’s the kind of advice that can seriously impede the health and growth of any organization, team or relationship – especially when things are tough."The fact is, leading, building, and growing a successful company requires having a few difficult conversations along the way."We’ve had to learn that the hard way. And oftentimes, the communication decisions we make in times of discomfort prove to be the ultimate litmus tests of an organizations’ maturity and ability to weather storms through honesty and transparency.That’s where Kim’s trademarked notion of Radical Candor comes into play.Since its release in 2017, her book Radical Candor: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity has become a constant point of reference and source of inspiration for the Workleap team. Now passed around the office as a rite of passage for newcomers and a friendly reminder for old-timers, it appeared on our co-founder Simon’s radar at a rather propitious moment: he’d started wondering if Workleap's so-called happiness culture might be a bit of a trap.

"We cared so much about people that we forgot that it was important to tell them the stuff they don’t necessarily want to hear. It was really detrimental to our culture and our business."

Simon De BaeneCEO and Co-founder of Workleap

Was our focus on unconditional kindness stopping projects, teams, and individuals from learning and growing to their full potential? Worse yet, had we misunderstood the concept of kindness altogether?We invited Kim to join the entire organization for a refreshingly honest video call and keynote address that would shed light on the practice of honesty. Of course, Simon also had all kinds of questions for Kim, so they set some time aside to chat about so-called “happiness” cultures, rethinking empathy, and tough talks.We’ll be sharing some of her insightful answers throughout the article.

It’s time to rethink empathy

In many ways, honesty has suffered from an unfairly bad rap. Often equated with disengaged harshness or seen as dichotomous to empathy, it’s become second nature for us to avoid giving honest feedback that may be perceived as negative or critical. It’s like we’ve all collectively agreed not to tell our colleagues about the metaphorical toilet paper stuck to their shoes. So to clear the air and kick-start our collective unlearning, Kim highlighted some of the things Radical Candor is not.

• An excuse to be a brutally honest jerk.
• A hall-pass for oversharing your personal thoughts.
• An assumption that what you’re saying is the implicit truth.
• A pretext to criticize or impose on someone’s personal life.
• A one-sided conversation or monologue.

Yet despite our best intentions, says Kim, in our initial attempts at thoughtful honesty, we’re all prone to falling into one or many of those false candor traps. And the one thing that causes many of us to falter from direct, effective communication? Ruinous empathy. A sense that telling someone the truth, no matter how tactfully or constructively, is inherently mean. But of course, that frames caring and love as being inherently opposed – and that’s where we go wrong, says Kim.Simon wanted to know a bit more about that idea in their follow-up chat.

To help illustrate the thin lines that separate thoughtful honesty from destructive righteousness, she uses a now-famous grid featuring genuine care on its horizontal axis, and direct challenging on its vertical one.

‍

‍

For a deeper dive into the intricacies of her theory, we suggest you pick up her book or check out her great talk from Qualtrics X4 Europe 2018, but here’s a quick overview of the triggers and behaviors we’re trying to avoid in those three counterproductive quadrants.

Ruinous empathy

When we choose not to tell someone something they need to know in order to spare their short-term feelings – and our own discomfort.

Manipulative insincerity

When we praise someone insincerely only to criticize them once their back is turned.

Obnoxious aggression

When feedback is given bluntly without any expression of care and thoughtfulness.Though they’re often motivated by a similar sense of discomfort, those reactions can look different in small and large organizations. Simon wanted to dig into those differences and explore the unique challenges of implementing honesty within small teams.

If you’re anything like us – and capable of a healthy dose of introspection – you’ve probably found yourself on both sides of this equation. And we’re willing to bet it wasn’t particularly pleasant or productive. But according to Kim, it’s that misguided empathy that’s most likely to shoot us in the foot.

"Eighty-five percent of the time, that's the mistake that we make at work and also, frankly, at home. [We’re] so concerned about the other person's feelings that we're unwilling to tell them something that they could fix easily if we just told them that it was a problem."Kim ScottCo-founder of Radical Candor LLC

So that begs the question: as leaders and managers, are we truly being kind by depriving talented team members of precious information and feedback they could use to improve? What if that feedback could allow them to grow into a promotion, or give them confidence in a new skill, or allow them to enter difficult situations with the full power of context and the right information?What if, instead, we framed the idea of honesty as a virtuous cycle that can have ripple effects across an entire organization’s ability to perform, collaborate, and grow? As honesty is proactively solicited, more spaces are carved out for constructive criticism and growth, allowing colleagues to caringly improve and support one another within a climate where they feel heard, seen, understood, and trusted.

As we’ve moved through the growing pains of our own transition towards thoughtful honesty, we’ve come to believe that there’s something a bit patronizing and belittling about the premise of avoidance to spare someone’s feelings. Do we not trust our talented colleagues to be professional and mature enough to handle their feelings just as we do ours?"As a leader, it’s your job to be considerate, constructive, and mindful in the way you deliver difficult news or feedback."Once that’s done, the ball is out of your court – all that’s left to do is trust your team to be open and receptive to your genuine desire to help. And if that trust isn’t there, says Kim, you’d better get to work and start building it.

After 15 years, how have our priorities changed? We aren’t the only ones reflecting on this: Victor Trinh was asking himself similar questions about his career when he joined our Innovation Lab. Arriving in time to put Softstart through its paces as one of its first users, his experience as a new hire and his front-end expertise were rapidly put to work to fine-tune the user experience. It’s this infusion of new perspectives to an ever-expanding talent base, that has powered Workleap since our beginnings.[cta url="https://www.gsoft.com/en/job-openings/" title=" We're hiring! See all our dev job openings" target="_blank"]

“I’ve always wanted to work in a lab: using the latest tech to power our projects, having the freedom to explore new avenues and methods, side-by-side with a team that shares the desire to push boundaries where they find them.”

Victor TrinhFront-end Developer at Workleap's Innovation Lab

(Re)discovering your passion

Victor honed his skills in full-stack development, but it was when he came across React that he developed his love for the front-end. From there, he worked in finance, on mobile apps and games. The more his career advanced, the more that his daily challenges became everything but what he really wanted to be doing: development. Luckily, that’s a few friends of his started telling him about GSoft.“At my previous jobs, I could easily spend 60% of my time in meetings. At the lab, we’re talking about less than 5%. I can focus on what I need to be doing, instead,” shares Victor. At the same time, he feels even more connected to the other teams: whether it’s devs, sales, marketing or management, everyone is on the same page. Having less meetings doesn’t mean sacrificing quality communication; if anything, it’s the opposite."

Grounded innovation

If an innovation lab is working so closely with the other branches of the company, it’s because they’re not trying to create products in a void. Here, innovation is about answering real-world needs and developing products that generate active users and a satisfied client base.That’s where Softstart comes in. Its genesis was a simple checklist for facilitating the onboarding of new team members. When we saw the interest that this kernel of an idea was generating, it was time for version 2.0. We wanted to offer added value, offering a human touch to an experience that can often be cold and isolating, especially in the new climate of remote work.“To arrive on my first day and see that I had video messages from everyone on my team to help me through each step, it was incredible. As team lead, I’ve often been on the other side of the table, and every time you had to start from scratch. With easy templates for each role on the team and the ability to automate paperwork and access red tape, you’re freed up to spend that time making sure your new hire feels at home with their new colleagues and team.”

What are you working on at the moment?

“Through QA and user research for Softstart, we noticed the steps where people were losing steam or abandoning the process entirely. From there, it was about identifying the best solution: do we simplify things, or add smaller steps and new activities to keep the user comfortable and moving forward?In the end, I redid the entire user interface. Not only for the user but to clean up the codebase. Softstart will eventually get its own development team and leave the lab, and those devs won’t necessarily be the ones who wrote it!”

A soft start so far, but what does the future bring?

The biggest draw of working in an innovation lab is the opportunity to experiment with new ideas: new products, new technologies, or just new ways of approaching old ways of doing things. “We chose Vue as a Javascript framework because all of our products are built with React and we wanted to compare the results. I’m not completely sold on it yet, but we’ve got a few devs who are head over heels with it!”It can also be the chance to create the heart of a new application that will continue to evolve for years to come. “At my first job, I was working with a monolithic app, but our architect was incredibly strict. I learned so much, but I also saw how when we started creating microservices, not every team approached their code with the same rigor.” That just highlights the importance of having a keen eye for detail and a drive for finding not just the right result, but the right method.The other side of the coin, though, is that there comes a time when you need to say goodbye to your creation. Softstart is the first project that Victor completes with Workleap and he can’t deny feeling a certain sorrow, as much as he’s excited to jump into the lab’s next big thing. You can’t always get everything you want, but if ever the time comes when a project captivates him too much to let go, Workleap didn’t get where it is today by standing in the way of passion.

In 2017, we decided to put an end to our services division entirely, and become a 100% product-centered company. That same year, we created the Innovation Lab: an arm of the organization that’s separate from our other activities, and which now has a single (albeit challenging) mission – to build Workleap' future products.

What’s an Innovation Lab to you?

S.D.B: Success is a double-edged sword. When you start from scratch, you’ll do anything to succeed for the first time. After that, it becomes your entire world. You go from seeking a small victory, to a medium one, to a great-big one. It’s neverending. It becomes problematic, though, when that need to succeed takes up all your time – because how do you pump energy into the next project? The Lab lets us assemble those next steps.

"Having an Innovation Lab means creating a dedicated space to explore and build the next big thing."

Simon De Baene,Co-founder and CEO, Workleap

It couldn’t be more relevant for an organization like Workleap: we want to do a lot of things, like create a family of products, diversify our offering, elevate our industry, continue to grow, seize opportunities and prepare for the future. Our Lab is essentially our experimentation arm.

How does ours work?

S.D.B: The Workleap Lab is focused solely on building new products that can be marketed for sale. It’s a very hands-on process – there’s not a whole lot of theory involved. It all starts with an idea, we identify the market and we execute. That’s it.Our latest product, Softstart, is a good example of that. We identified a need within many organizations, Workleap included: to onboard new employees in a more "human" way. We tested the market with an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) and the response was great. From that point on, we were all in.It’s pretty cool to be able to solve a problem that we’re facing ourselves. During the pandemic, it was that much more challenging, too.

How did the Lab go from promoting innovation within the company to building new products?

S.D.B: The Lab has definitely evolved over the years. It’s promoted innovation within the organization, we’ve organized hackathons, experimented tons, improved on existing products… We've done everything through the Lab and each adventure has played a part in Workleap's growth. But we want more. Today, the Lab has one main focus: to create GSoft’s future products.Our light bulb moment came when we realized who we really are at Workleap. We’ve always wanted to fix concrete problems; academia isn’t our jam, we like things cut and dried. The Lab is actually an extension of our most authentic selves."The Lab is actually an extension of our most authentic selves."

What challenges is the Lab up against?

S.D.B:

• Creating products that are both simple and powerful. In this day and age, creativity and design have to be taken to the next level.
• Creating good technology, in other words, not getting caught up in the fanfare. It’s tempting to want to test all sorts of new tech, but if you’re not solving a concrete problem, you’re really just playing around.
• Delivering new value weekly. We don’t have the luxury of a long development cycle. We work to create value within a short cycle and we don't waste months trying to manage innumerable cases.
• Building products that meet market needs. Sometimes a light bulb will go off, but it’s not every day that we'll stumble upon the best solution right off the bat. That’s when the phrase "the devil is in the details" really hits home.
• Creating a start-up culture in a company like Workleap, which has been around for more than 15 years. We’re always looking for the right people in that sense.

At Workleap, building good products, requires good people

S.D.B: Working at Workleap, and more specifically in our Innovation Lab, is not for everybody. We're well aware of that. Uncertainty is something we experience daily. We create things without previous versions to refer back to. The road is often bumpy and we have to really trust our instincts.

“You have to be at ease knitting your own parachute as you free fall.”

Some of the qualities we really value at Workleap and, more specifically, on a team like the Lab:

• The ability to find your own way without needing a list of predetermined tasks.
• Being able to manage your time in an environment that requires a lot of autonomy.
• To make risky decisions regularly. Put yourself out there and hope for the best.
• At Workleap, we tell it like it is, so you have to be able to put your ego aside sometimes.
• Risk tolerance. We start from scratch, everything needs doing. And yeah, sometimes there's risk involved.
• Building a product is kind of wild. When you think things can’t get any worse, that’s when you really have to dig in.
• The Lab is a small team, so there’s no choice but to wear a few hats and help each other out.

[cta url="https://www.gsoft.com/en/careers/" title="We're hiring in the Lab and elsewhere at GSoft" target="_blank"]

How do we address failure at Workleap?

S.D.B: Failure is not something we go looking for, but it’s also inevitable in some respects. At Workleap, you won’t hear the word 'failure' come out of our mouths very often – we prefer to refer to it as experimentation. The idea is to quickly come up with potential solutions and to either implement them or to move on altogether.We make our fair share of mistakes, and I think it’s important to be able to admit that, yeah, we mess up. As far as I’m concerned, it’s the folks who can openly acknowledge their mistakes that make the best leaders of the Lab.We’ve tried to launch more than 20 products in the history of Workleap, and only two have really stuck. That’s what experimenting is all about. We try, we stumble, we start over. ShareGate and Officevibe have been there. And we're super proud of our latest addition, Softstart. But we're pretty sure it, too, will face its share of obstacles.

"We’ve tried to launch more than 20 products in the history of Workleap, and only two have really stuck. That’s what experimenting is all about."

If I were to tell you to grab uncertainty by the hand and go somewhere, where would you go?

S.D.B: Uncertainty and I go way back. So probably straight to the Lab!

Any advice for staying afloat?

S.D.B: Surround yourself with good people who understand and respect the process of building new products from scratch. Seeing eye to eye will always make weathering the different storms a little easier.

What would you say to someone who’s on the fence about working in the Lab?

It’s not for everyone, but if you feel like:

• Learning how to build a product
• Living the startup experience
• Growing faster than you’ve ever grown before
• Wearing many hats
• Being right in the thick of it

Then...welcome aboard!

Aged 10, Alexandre Martel is trying to get around the restrictions his parents have placed on the family computer. A little curiosity, a few calculations and a dash of creativity later, and the admin password has mysteriously been reset. Let’s just say his knowledge in the manipulation of the front-end have been honed for a very long time. At Officevibe, he applies his expertise to every level of the development process.

Discovering the other dimension

We often talk about back-end and front-end as though they were two different worlds. The front-end is for the artists who deal in design and intuition; backend requires a more precise methodology, a scientific approach. Alex sees things differently, with fare more similarities than divergences. Both put the highest value on performance, a programming error can sink an interface as fast as a database, and the most efficient code is often the one that stands out for its creativity.

Trained heavily in the back-end, Alex had never really touched front-end stuff before arriving at Workleap. In our old software engineering department, he developed applications from scratch for our clients. That’s where he started to see the attraction of design and user experience.

“At my core, I’m a very artistic person: I draw, I paint, I play the piano. To go get that from my job as well was phenomenal! But at the same time, if all I did was front-end it would never be enough: I need that logical, scientific side too, whether it’s clean code or measuring my flour to the precise gram!”

Alexandre MartelSenior Full-Stack Developer at Officevibe

Becoming the lynchpin between worlds

Alex’s front-end expertise was born from his back-end knowledge base, his artistic talent and his empathy for the end user. Today, these three elements are still central to his role at Officevibe. He’s the first one to put up his hands in design meetings to offer the developer perspective. When his team is pushing code into production, he’s the one who wrote the front-end programming standards and who ensures they’re being respected. And he makes sure to keep a foot in the user research sphere, to stay up to date with his clients’ needs

What projects are you working on?

“1-on-1 functionalities have been live on Officevibe for over a year now. We’ve been getting more and more feedback from our users asking for a few more features, stuff like a better structure for meeting agendas, as well as meeting “templates” to speed up the process.To integrate this, we had to make some important changes to the way 1-on-1s operated the application. First and foremost, we had to ensure that we were going to actually improve their experience, and not just make changes for change’s sake. Right now, we’re at the stage of progressively deploying these new functionalities, from Workleap's test ecosystem outwards to our clients.This user research has been really eye-opening, because our clients often put a lot of emphasis on changes that we considered minor. It makes you realize how much little details like that can make the difference.”“It’s honestly liberating to work with the front-end, halfway between design and the back-end”, shares Alex. “I get to work with the flexibility to focus on whatever motivates me that day, whether it’s taking a static model and turning it into an interactive interface, or diving into the code to search out a bit of performance or a stubborn bug.” This constant variety is one of the things he appreciates most about his environment at Workleap.As much as design has always played a central role at Workleap, it’s only in recent years that we’ve really dedicated ourselves to having front-end experts in all our teams. “It takes someone who’s really motivated to change things, but the advantage is that there is an enormous amount of room for new ideas. If you’ve got a clear vision of what you want to accomplish, there’s no better place to make your mark!”

When you think development, the first image that comes to mind is innovative tech and hot new apps; Mathieu Gamache, however, thinks about the people around him. For him, development is working together to overcome any challenge and building a team that supports every one of its members, both professionally and personally. With ShareGate Apricot, he’s found his community.

Team first

Our industry was founded on innovation and improvement; it’s easy, then, to get carried away by new technologies and ways of doing things. All too often, teams are too busy imposing the newest agile methodology to take the time to consider their group’s actual needs.Having gone from a career path in electrical engineering to programming, it was the respective company cultures he experienced during his internships that convinced Mathieu to become a dev. Between working in the corner cubicle of a huge corporation and being an integral part of a team from his first day aboard, the choice was easy. Leaving behind the shirt and tie for a pair of jeans and a t-shirt, he found not only his desired workspace, more creative and open to initiative, but he also found himself engaged with the projects and products he was most interested in.

“At the end of the day, whether it’s a video game, a web app, dev tools or launching a rocket to the moon, the most exciting technology stack in the world isn’t going to be enough. If the team isn’t a fit for you, you’re going to have some long days ahead of you…”

Mathieu GamacheFull-Stack Developer at ShareGate Apricot

Teamwork is work

It’s not that he’s indifferent to his work. On the contrary, he loves the dev work at the heart of small teams in the start-up world: the role of a generalist, fresh challenges every day and the autonomy to follow one’s own initiative. At Apricot, Mathieu might spend the morning in design meetings before putting on his detective’s cap and figuring out how to solve a client issue that’s been flagged. These diverse experiences all end up adding to his dev toolbox, ready to be repurposed for future opportunities.But he’s always got an eye for improvement and team solidarity. When Apricot was launched, the team’s expertise was very much back-end oriented. With a few colleagues, Mathieu started a little “front-end community” to establish a solid foundation in the field and to rapidly share these competencies across the team.Along the same lines, the first Thursday of the month is now the Code-and-Beer, freestyle soirées where the devs can get together to explore the far corners of their craft not always permitted by the demands of the 9-to-5. The second Thursday is even more laid-back: it’s Coquetel hour, a mixological expedition that has evolved with the times into work-from-home hashtags like #Coqstagram and #Coqlympics.

What projects have you got going?

“Emerging from talks in our front-end community, we decided to migrate our code from JavaScript to TypeScript. It was crucial that this refactor had a minimal impact on feature delivery, so we had to think hard about migration strategies for such a change.The advantage of TypeScript and JavaScript is that they can operate alongside each other, which opened the door for a progressive transition. After having modified the app’s bootstrap to support TypeScript and giving a bootcamp training to the devs, we were ready to go!The rules were simple: if you implement a new feature, it happens in TypeScript. If you make a significant change to an existing file, you migrate it to TypeScript. The last time I checked, our codebase is now 80% Typescript; the client never noticed a thing and our devs are finding life just that much simpler!”

Teams - Workleap

Though he’s certainly got the skills for a career in event planning, Mathieu is laser-focused on the needs of his team: “you have to find the right balance between fun and ROI. At Workleap, we’re always game for new ideas, as long as you can demonstrate the return. Last year, we organized a hackathon that doubled as training on machine learning.”

Team cohesion is often treated as a shortcut to productivity, as though devs were another resource to maximize. For Mathieu, though, “it’s the most important factor in wanting to come to work in the morning,” and it’s impossible not to believe him when he talks about the Scopa lunches, Clark Thursdays, team retrospectives or the new effort to provide regular inter-peer feedback to complement the manager’s annual review.In the constant search for performance, it’s easy enough to lose sight of the fact that the product exists in a symbiotic relationship with the human needs of the team, not in opposition. For Mathieu, development is as much about taking care of one’s team as it is about chasing down bugs or delivering new features to production.

With the rapid development of Cloud computing over the past few years, we’ve gone from hosting individual virtual machines to entire virtual servers, along with the infrastructure dedicated to software development and client-facing services. As a result, developers are looking to better understand (and even help design) the infrastructure environment in which their software operates, while IT operates and deploys infrastructure in ways that borrow heavily from software development pipelines.As the cross-over between software development and IT operations increases, so has the importance of some best practices, known collectively as DevOps.

Who becomes a DevOps specialist?

It’s telling that neither Pierre-Antoine CloudOps Developer at Officevibe nor Yohan Belval, DevOps lead and full-stack developer over at ShareGate, considers their role to be centred around DevOps itself. Unlike many agile systems that provide a complete framework for their methodology, there is no defined set of DevOps principles. Yohan doesn’t even like using the term if he can avoid it. To him, each practice needs to be investigated individually, to determine if it can really aid his team or if it will just increase the complexity of their development cycle.

" I consider myself a Cloud specialist, not a DevOps specialist. For us, DevOps is a mentality rather than a defined role. We ensure our teams work in DevOps mode, going beyond the tools we put in place to the methods in which we work and iterate."

Pierre-Antoine DeshaiesCloudOps Developer at Officevibe, Workleap

So, what are we left with? At its core, integrating DevOps is simply a search for faster, more reliable tools with which to develop and support your product. It can be tackled as a radical overhaul of your entire operation, as was the case for Pierre-Antoine’s Officevibe team. They went from a traditional release train every two weeks to a cycle of continuous deployment — in which rapid iteration, micro-optimizations and experimentation, and feature switches allowed them to deploy code within minutes of it being integrated into the master branch, without sacrificing stability or security.But it can also be done with a more conservative, methodical approach, as with Yohan’s ShareGate Apricot, where the focus was on automation and monitoring capabilities that support a more standard development cycle.

Who becomes a DevOps specialist?

If you’ve been following along, then by definition: nobody. But that’s not a very interesting answer, is it? Though we believe DevOps needs to be integrated on a team basis, there is still room for folks to lead the crossover from Dev to Ops, or vice versa. (Here at Workleap, we’re more of a software shop, so our experience has mostly been with devs learning IT magic.)It won’t be a specialist, though. If anything, it’s the jack-of-all-trades generalist that Yohan calls to mind when thinking of the ideal candidate. That’s because they’ll need to juggle development, deployment, configuration and monitoring duties as the need arises.

Yohan’s 3 tips for aspiring DevOps leads

1. You need to be driven by an interest in infrastructure. Distance yourself from the devs who want to focus on a specialty, algorithms or best dev practices, and don’t really care where or how it gets deployed.

2. Choose a platform. For Workleap, the answer was Microsoft Azure, but make sure to get comfortable with your organization’s platform of choice.

3. Once you know your way around, it’s time to develop everything but software: the infrastructure, configs and web/security protocols that keep your product running efficiently and securely.

His own path first took him from electrical engineering to software design. He became Workleap expert on Microsoft SharePoint, which paired perfectly with his natural curiosity about IT infrastructure. When he made the formal move to DevOps lead after eight years at the company, he was more than ready for the role!As for Pierre-Antoine, his team at Officevibe had been hunting for a candidate to fill a senior Cloud operations position for over a year when, as a young recruit, he took a chance, presented a plan to management on how he could evolve into the role, and has since rewarded that faith by being instrumental in leading Officevibe’s DevOps overhaul.While they’ve come at the task from very different backgrounds, the key to their success has been making sure that the practices they integrate are perfectly suited to the needs of their team, rather than making change for change’s sake.

When is DevOps the right choice for your team?

“The boat was sinking, and it was all hands on deck to bail ourselves out of it. We survived, though, and from there we put in place the practices to ensure we’d never have to go through that again,” confides Pierre-Antoine.They called it the Perfect Storm. Officevibe had reached a point of no return: performance was atrocious, development was slowing down, and even Workleap's founders were coming by to share their concerns. Then, an ultimatum from our biggest client: if the performance issues weren’t fixed yesterday, they were out.While we don’t recommend trying it at home, this Perfect Storm was also a perfect time for re-evaluation and overhaul. Our two-week release schedule was causing bottlenecks for both testing and development, so we moved towards continuous delivery. To ensure resilient code and minimize impacts on our clients, we instituted a series of feature switches, so that we could deploy releases into progressively larger testing environments. (And yes, we do eat our own dog food here at Workleap!) Automated monitoring alerts us of any performance issues within five minutes of a service going live. The list of examples could go on, but suffice it to say that, for Officevibe, this radical restructuring allowed us to navigate away from future situations like the Perfect Storm while also improving development speed and security.But the transition towards a DevOps mentality doesn’t have to be so all-or-nothing. The project that would become ShareGate Apricot was launched with a more traditional model, and even today Yohan’s team schedules their design, development and deployment process in two-week increments.It’s not that they’re unaware of or uninterested in DevOps practices; far from it, in fact. This is a team that relies on much of the same performance telemetry as Officevibe, to avoid falling into their old trap. It’s a team that’s automating infrastructure creation, relying on coded configurations instead of manual inputs, which saves countless hours of work when something breaks or is lost.Still, just because a new practice exists doesn’t mean it will automatically pay dividends. For example, Yohan does eventually want to move towards smaller, more specialized teams that will be better suited to continuous development and other practices. But it will happen along a timeline that makes sense for his team’s reality, to ensure that when it does happen they’ll actually see a benefit.When all is said and done, why bother with DevOps?If our teams are any example, there is no magic answer for how and when DevOps practices are right for a given team. But whether there are storm clouds on the horizon or there’s smooth sailing ahead, there is always room for improvement, productivity and reliability.

And we’re learning more every day. For Pierre-Antoine, seeing developers working with more knowledge of the environment in which their applications live has resulted in a better understanding of performance and stability requirements, cutting down on time spent optimizing and bug fixing.For Yohan, more software in the Cloud means more APIs means better integration between applications, allowing one organization’s product to highlight the strengths of another, as well as providing the data to convince clients of the proposition.And for you, we wish you the best in discovering how to leverage this new space between development and operations in ways that will most benefit your team. If this is something you’ve developed a passion for, why not reach out? We’re always looking for new collaborators.