Frank Tobias on the impact of experimentation and engineering culture at Preply
We sat down to chat to Frank Tobias, our Engineering Manager, for a fascinating discussion about engineering culture at Preply, adapting a hybrid working model, and his teams’ hiring goals to support growth aspirations.
What’s the scope of your role at Preply?
I’m a software engineering manager in Preply’s Engineering Chapter supporting our Enterprise, Payments, and Tutor Ranking teams. The products are different, but the job goals are the same: grow and support our engineering teams to deliver great solutions and achieve business goals. I’m not alone in this though, as I partner with product managers, designers, analysts, researchers, copywriters, localization specialists and other engineering leaders. Software development is definitely a team sport!
Our teams are focused on a variety of projects such as fine-tuning our tutor ranking algorithm, improving our checkout and withdrawal experience, and enabling other companies to offer language learning to their employees. These projects have different user-facing and business goals and I need to understand each of them, so that I can drive delivery in a way that makes sense. I spend a lot of time learning what’s necessary to move an initiative forward and then taking steps to unblock it. Directing our engineering teams towards what’s valuable for our learners, tutors, and stakeholders is at the heart of my responsibilities, and if I am growing others as well, then I’m doing a good job.
Which team are you in and how is it structured?
The teams I spend the most time with are Enterprise, Payments, and Ranking, though I also collaborate with my Engineering Manager colleagues to grow and improve the Engineering Chapter.
Engineering teams at Preply have similar structures and relationships inspired by Spotify’s squad, tribe, and chapter structure (see the illustration below). A fully staffed engineering team has an engineering manager, product manager, front and backend engineers, a designer, UX researcher, and business analyst. For example, our Payments team has been established for a year and follows that model closely, but our Enterprise Team is still growing and is looking to hire for some open roles. We are looking for people who can be flexible about taking on responsibilities that are outside of their traditional roles. It presents growth opportunities directly on the job though it risks a person spreading themselves too thin by driving too many things at once. It’s definitely startup life!
Most of our engineering teams alternate between working remotely and onsite. People mostly live within commuting distance of our Barcelona and Kyiv offices, though some are as far away as Russia, the UAE, the US, and Brazil. Agreeing on core work hours and communicating often about these is the only way we can effectively balance engagement and rest. This transparency about what we like and don’t like has been the key to evolving our culture and practices to meet people’s expectations. I try to come to the office a couple of days a week, usually to meet coworkers from another location, but I also come in just to meet with colleagues locally to make progress on an idea. Connecting with people in person is a great motivator for me at work and I try to do it often, even though it means the pajamas have to stay at home. Our great in-office coffee service doesn’t hurt either 😉.
What do you enjoy the most about your job?
It’s incredibly engaging to design and run experiments that can positively impact user experience. When we walk through a user journey prototype, we imagine what we can do to improve our learner and tutor experiences. Does what we’ve designed make sense for them? We might be confident that we’ve improved a scenario or solved a problem, but we don’t declare success until we’ve tested our changes in production.
Waking up each morning and checking how our experiment has affected user behavior is always exciting because we can see how our work impacts learners, tutors, and hopefully our business results! Of course we always hope that we’ve gotten the solution right, but we have to wait for the data to come in to be sure. Then we’ll review the results after a few weeks and iterate. Making these changes and then seeing the daily impact on business metrics and user satisfaction is really gratifying. It’s also why having an experiment reporting tool like Gosset is so great as it closes that feedback loop.
What has been your career journey before joining Preply?
I started as an entry-level software developer at a (then) small company printing business cards called Vistaprint, based just outside of Boston. Vistaprint was a rapidly growing start-up and to be successful meant adapting to the changing environment by learning quickly and changing roles. After several years I was promoted to lead engineer with several direct reports and I discovered that I enjoyed having leadership responsibility. With some guidance from my manager I gradually transitioned from software development to managing full-time. It began with leading small projects to build and improve our internally used software solution and over time I moved on to larger projects serving our customers. Eventually I was leading multiple-teams for a project integrating our web based photobook designer with their manufacturing backend. It was a blast!
At that point I was given the opportunity to take a scrum master certification course and I jumped on it. Scrum is a great way to seed the behaviors of autonomy, mastery, and purpose in development teams and the material resonated strongly with my own beliefs. Shortly after I began to lead fixed engineering teams, starting with one and eventually growing to seven across three continents. It was a wonderful ride leading up to that point, but I realized I needed a break. I had been at Vistaprint for 15 ½ years when I finally paused to take 9 months off, a truly rewarding time. Eventually I began to itch for a project and so I took on an engineering management role at New Relic. I wanted to see how it felt to lead in a different environment and while I formed great relationships with my teams, I felt the distance from my background in web development at a smaller scale — at which point I decided to jump over to Preply!
What motivated you to join Preply?
Preply’s product is very aligned with my own personal journey of language learning (or lack of it) as I relocated to Barcelona yet had only invested time in the complimentary group lessons offered by my employer. In addition, the company was at a stage that reminded me of my first years working in tech. I also thought it could be fun to be involved in a startup again, but now with the knowledge and experience I’ve gained since the first time around.
What has been your biggest learning at Preply to date?
How to build relationships between our Barcelona and Kyiv offices: Being direct and kind goes a long way.
What’s one tip you would give to succeed at Preply? What would be your advice to a new joiner?
Make sure your goals are aligned with growing the company by delighting our learners and supporting our tutors to be great at it.
What are your ambitions for this year for yourself and your team?
For Preply Enterprise, I hope that we’ll build a product impressive enough to win the hearts of new B2B accounts. When it comes to our Payments team, I would love for us to continue reducing transaction costs and making it easier for learners in other countries to pay in the way that they prefer. As for the Tutor Ranking team, my aspiration is that we get even better at suggesting the perfect match for our learners and tutors.
What inspired you to get into engineering and what keeps it interesting?
I was exposed to computers at a young age through playing games at school, our local library, and later at home. When I was teenager I began building and selling websites for local businesses. I realized that I wanted to be involved in web development and ecommerce and that I could make a living doing it. In college, I continued working on websites before I finally took a job as an entry-level software developer at Vistaprint. Being open to adapting and trying new roles and responsibilities has created new challenges and opportunities. I’ve met many new people and learned a lot by being open-minded. Moving to Spain didn’t hurt either :-)
What do you like to do in your free time?
I’m an avid runner and I hit the pavement in the morning at least twice a week. Even if it’s painful to get out of bed, the feeling I have when I get back home makes it all worth it.
Would you like to join Frank and work in a purpose-driven organisation where work, growth and learning happen at the same time? Preply continues growing and we are actively looking for talented candidates to join our Engineering team! If you are excited by taking on a new challenge, then check out our open positions here.
