Anthony Hughes on the importance of staying curious and creating human connections in a hybrid team
Meet Anthony, our Engineering Manager based in the Barcelona office who joined us almost 2 years ago. We sat down to learn more about his career path leading up to Preply, the main challenges he’s been working on, and what makes his job interesting after all these years.
What’s the scope of your role at Preply?
I’m an Engineering Manager (EM) here at Preply’s Barcelona office. The scope of an EM is across three main areas: people, team and organization. From the people and team side of things, we normally work within 2–3 teams to try to create an environment for engineers where they’re engaged, growing professionally and most importantly, where they’re developing technology that supports what the business needs.
At an organizational level it’s supporting our growing engineering department with the right tools, structure, design and processes to keep things running smoothly.
What that means more specifically is hiring, people management, support and coaching, hiring, organisational design and change management, supporting our cross-functional teams, facilitating cross-team connections, designing processes, supporting DEI initiatives… there’s a lot.
Which team are you in and how is it structured?
I work with 2 cross-functional teams at the moment. One is the CRM team that designs and delivers all of the Preply-to-customer communications as well as supporting the infrastructure to make it all happen. The other is the Subscriptions team who works on recurring subscriptions and new business model initiatives within Preply.
The functions within those cross-functional teams include engineering, design, copywriting, marketing, and product managers. They also have data and user research people supporting the team. These teams can vary in size. Most commonly a team might be around 5–8 people but depending on the domain of the team or a particular moment in the team’s growth, it could be up to 12 or more people.
We do work across different time zones, usually it’s the single hour that separates our Barcelona office from the Kyiv one. It’s not uncommon though for a team member to be working across a bigger timezone. For example we just had a new starter who is working from Argentina, prior to that our Tech Lead worked from Mexico for several months while arranging to relocate to Barcelona.
What do you enjoy the most about your job?
I think the thing I enjoy the most is the people I get to work with. I get to work daily with engineers, product managers, data scientists and analysts, designers, copywriters, marketers etc. People with very different skill sets and expertise which makes for a really collaborative and creative environment. But even more importantly — really nice people from diverse backgrounds and cultures who seem to me very open, welcoming and humble.
What inspired you to go into your field of work and what keeps it interesting?
Originally with coding it was the “making” part of it. I studied architecture which is, amongst other things, designing and making things in the real world. With code I could do the same thing but in a digital space. I could be creative in the way I solved technical problems and then also see the end product of what I’d “made”, and see it working and being used by people which was rewarding.
What keeps it interesting as a manager now though is different: being in an industry where you need to keep learning all the time, facing new problems, or even new versions of familiar problems are all things that keep it interesting for me.
What has been your career journey before joining Preply?
I started my career coding, then working less as an IC and began taking Tech Lead roles and then moved to managing one team to managing multiple teams. I spent many years working in London in startups and design agencies before I moved to Barcelona.
The journey wasn’t quite as linear as I’ve made it look. There were times when I went from management back to hands-on coding and vice versa — it’s kind of a common thing in technical leadership. In the end I’ve always come back to management as I really enjoy the challenges of supporting people and teams.
What motivated you to join Preply?
The product itself was one of the motivations: the fact that it was in education and specifically language learning. I find the education sector a really rewarding space to be in and I’ve been trying to master Spanish since I moved here so it was a nice match.
The other motivation was what I took away from initial chats I had with Dmytro, our CTO. I really felt there was a match in what we thought was important and specifically how we viewed the importance of people in our respective roles.
What has been your biggest challenge at Preply to date?
Recently I’ve come to think that to really excel at remote working has been a challenge. Like many companies, we moved to a fully-remote working model when the pandemic hit and we’ve managed quite well — the transition was smooth and we’ve grown the number of people and the business a lot since that transition. But I still think we can do better at making connections and building bonds and relationships between people and making sure we have time for fun sometimes.
I’m finding remote working makes it harder to get a sense of the well-being of individuals. When you’re sitting beside someone in the office it’s easier to notice signs of a low mood, stress… or even excitement! But with remote, there are less interactions and so you’re relying on 15–20 minutes during a daily standup or other longer meetings to see if you can pick up on these signals. Which has its limitations. So again, you need to find ways to build relationships and safe spaces remotely, where people can reach out to each other or managers for support, to vent, to commiserate or celebrate.
I’ve used weekly one-on-one’s to try to fill a gap here. Of course they’ve always been a place where I can ask direct questions on how someone might be doing. But I’ve also intentionally used it as open time to disconnect and stray away from work-only topics. If we run out of business-as-usual agenda items and end up going off topic to chat about why a local eco horse-riding school is the best or the technical capabilities of gas-powered potato cannons (true stories) I’m fine with that. It helps break up a day, let people open up and discharge and I hope build a connection with individuals outside of just “the work”.
What’s one tip you would give to succeed at Preply? What would be your advice to a new joiner?
My tip would be to be curious. Sometimes it’s easy to assume that the way we do things is set in stone and/or has been carefully planned to work a certain way. In a lot of cases it’s true, we do consider carefully how we do things, especially at the business level where we have very clear plans and direction.
But in some areas, in part because of how fast we’ve grown, there are things at a team level or within the engineering department that are open for questioning and curiosity. Maybe some practice was a good idea a year and a half ago but now isn’t quite the right solution given changes that have happened since. In which case there’s room for you to suggest, innovate and experiment and bring your own ideas.
Full disclosure though: you do need patience and energy to make it happen. You won’t always know which area is changeable and which not. And sometimes change won’t happen immediately and will take effort. You might need to convince, align and gather people around an idea, there might be resistance but there are opportunities for everyone to help make us better and more successful as a company.
Are you intrigued by the challenge of rethinking how we do things and working to improve our product to achieve a positive impact for our global customer base? Then check out our open vacancies here and apply now!
