Boozt Technology Baltics

How can one understand what it’s like to be working for a specific company?

A question with no quick answer. There are several angles to look at, and each speaks something a bit different.

We’re ending this year with 53 colleagues:

🔎 4 Managers
🔎 9 Team Leads
🔎 16 Senior Developers
🔎 27 people working longer than two years
🔎 13 who joined us this year

Behind these stats, there are 53 amazing people - people who (echoing their voice):

💡 cherish good relationships in team and cross-team
💡 can count on co-workers
💡 enjoy having a work-life balance
💡 feel they can be themselves at work
💡 define their colleagues as professional, interesting, respectful, friendly, fun and… human!

So this is us - people with different responsibilities, positions and working experiences, yet still - equal people. We’re happy to be a place with not only a professional but also a people-focused approach alive.

Therefore we ended this year with a little bit of both during our Christmas party. The “BooztStar” awards, spotlighting some epic moments from our daily life, was the most fun and unexpected. An interesting “Protų kovos” game followed where the mastery of some was unbelievable, but the road to it was even more enjoyable. And for later - well, you know what happens later with good company of people.

📸 Vytenis Budrys

You know that feeling when you take your time to zoom out from daily tasks and have a look at what you’re doing from a broader perspective? When you talk to someone working on the same project but on a bit different side, you can share your way of seeing things and hear how colleagues see it. Sometimes those views complement each other, and other times it leads to some friendly battle to decide which way to go further.

This is what we had during our WebApp Squads Meetup in Malmo, Boozt HQ. All the teams working in our product, account, checkout, listing, navigation, search, price, and landing squads gathered together. 68 colleagues from three different offices met and we had nearly ⅓ of our Vilnius office out there - full Goblins, Podify, Banksters and Switch teams.

During this three-day hackathon, we focused on performance and optimization on both a technical and organizational level. In squads, we discussed our bottlenecks and what we could do to improve, then hacked our ideas out and later showed them off during the WebApp Meet-up presentations. We were happy to find many areas we could optimize and fix them during the hackathon and the days following. We are business driven and this is where we focus first of all. Therefore it was nice to get the brain thinking about things we wanted to do but maybe lowered the priority earlier.

The other goal, maybe even more important, of this gathering was to bond with each other: to foster cross-team relationships, get more interpersonal communication, and get to know each other not only as professionals but as people as well. Afterwork in Malmo and Copenhagen was, as always, a good idea for that.