Our origin story
We’re not Batman, but we’d like to think that our intentions are still pure and pretty valid. Why create a community in the first place?!
Product Development Tirana brings together experienced people in the IT sector or anyone genuinely interested in building high-quality, digital products. From ideation – to the final step!
Whether through the power of market research, UI/UX, getting your hands dirty with code, or any other part of the product development process. This initiative will serve as a bridge to enhance the visibility of product experts in Tirana, create a network of potential partners and hosts for future events, and find new talents.
Our first event: Agile Teams – Local vs. Remote?
An old proverb says, “a good beginning is half the work done.” Our first community event would attest to that.
In a meetup held at our Communardo offices in Tirana, we discussed, played games, and learned from panelists all about building agile teams, and the complexities of remote vs in-office work.
As the future of work is completely transforming due to the pandemic, companies are moving towards a distributed workforce. But is that the way to go?!
According to a new study from Microsoft, remote work is challenging the connections between specific business units. On the other hand, talent distribution has never been this easy.
Our participants had many thoughts on all that, and more.
But who are the faces behind the opinions?
Three different individuals, connected by the passion to build great products.
Juela Zeneli (The moderator that kept us on our toes!)
Juela started her journey at Communardo three years ago as a Quality Assurance Tester. Her talent and passion for product development led her to now working as a Product Owner & Team Lead for Communardo Tirana. During the event, Juela made sure even the most introverted guest would participate enjoyably.
Judith Winkler (Our German guest)
Judith has been with Communardo for more than fifteen years. With a long experience in consulting, marketing and management, she now takes care of teams and tools, like processes and organization as Co-Head of Communardo Products. She traveled all the way to share those experiences with us!
Julian Demeti (The CEO that offers innovation)
Julian is the founder and CEO of Albanian Business Partner, an ICT company with experience in software development, software testing, body lease, web/app applications, and digital marketing. Their teams breathe agile and work with the best technologies to provide high-quality solutions. As an experienced Managing Director, Julian knows what makes high-functioning teams tick.
Fun Time
It’s showtime!
You might not always remember numbers and stats, but you do remember stories. That is why we mainly based our event on interactions and storytelling.
It all started with a “pass the cute bear” game. Because what breaks the ice better than an icebreaking game?! The person with the bear at hand needed to answer one of the questions on the screen. We learned what animals participants wanted to be or who their childhood heroes were. Fun!
Then the stage was passed to Judith and Julian, each presenting their pros and cons for remote vs in-office work. Valuable arguments were made from both sides, as you would expect from these agile connoisseurs. What did we settle on? A middle ground of course. Whilst working remotely has never been as easy (and forced by the pandemic) as today, face-to-face interactions and bonding time remain of equal importance.
Last but not least, the mic was passed to the audience: “What does your perfect agile team look like?”
Participants had to draw a candy from a bag and all the people with a matching color candy formed a group. With five groups in total, each had their very firm beliefs on what agility means for the well-being of a team and its product. One group even created a “human storyboard”, to represent the idea that the product backlog needs to be “alive” and forever changing.
Overall, it was one big exciting, and energetic evening! A big thank you goes out to each Communardo team member that helped with the organization, and of course, to the ones who joined and gave us their time and attention. Both are very valuable, and we don’t take them lightly!
To the ones who couldn’t attend the event, it’s not too late! Join our community to get notified about any future endeavors. If you have any topic suggestions, want to be a speaker, or even host the upcoming events, please feel free to contact us. Looking forward to hearing from all of you!
