Some junior software engineers may feel an impulse to stay quiet during important meetings — but not on Alex Lostak’s team.
“At GTV, we do a great job of ensuring we get everyone’s perspective when we’re looking at problems,” Lostak said.
The head of engineering at Grocery TV strives to cultivate an engineering team culture that enables everyone to contribute to the conversation.
When issues do arise, he and his peers fall back on their team’s open, collaborative nature to seek solutions. Lostak said that having this type of culture is important because the team develops software for a variety of purposes, meaning engineers must be both reliable team players and responsible owners of the specific applications they oversee.
And in doing so, he explained, team members don’t just get to shape the future of the company; they get to “be an expert in their own space.”
Read on to learn more about the empowering culture on Lostak’s team at Grocery TV and how it helps him and his peers overcome challenges and deliver impactful products.
About Grocery TV
Grocery TV is an in-store retail media network with over 22,000 displays in grocery stores across the United States and over 200 retail partners.
Retailers partner with Grocery TV to connect their in-store retail media strategy, engage with shoppers and generate incremental revenue. Brands leverage Grocery TV to reach over 70 million shoppers in brick-and-mortar stores. Through integrations with all major demand-side platforms, Grocery TV helps brand marketers launch and manage digital advertising campaigns throughout the grocery store, where the majority of purchases occur.
What defines your engineering team’s approach to product development?
Our approach to development as a team starts with collaboration. Whether we’re designing new system architecture or reviewing our ways of working, everyone is involved in the conversation. In many teams, it’s often easy for more junior engineers to feel like they shouldn’t state their opinions and should instead simply nod at what more senior engineers say. I think that an open and collaborative approach fosters faster growth for junior engineers and helps the senior engineers on our team ensure they’re thinking about things the right way and articulating their vision for projects properly.
“Whether we’re designing new system architecture or reviewing our ways of working, everyone is involved in the conversation.”
Tell me about a time when you and your teammates banded together to take a tricky project across the finish line.
Earlier this year, we had to make a fundamental change to a core component of our data model to support GTV’s future vision. This change impacted most of our applications at each one’s foundation, as we were changing a core component of our business logic. It also represented immense risk in that it would require all of the updates to our system to be deployed simultaneously.
The team met the challenge with tenacity and grace. Both our engineering and data teams worked diligently to ensure we accounted for all dependencies. Throughout the project, the team ensured that they kept one another up to date on any design changes that popped up throughout development.
I’m proud to say that the final deployment rolled out across our entire tech stack smoothly and without regression. That speaks to the incredible people on our team, and I’m thankful every day to get to work with them.
What’s unique about your engineering team, and how does this influence the way you all accomplish your work?
As an engineering team, we have an incredibly unique combination of strong individual ownership and collaboration. Due to the nature of our business, our tech stack has a wide scope in the functions that it covers. We build software that runs on physical devices, but we also build high-scale back-end applications that have drastically different needs and requirements.
The result of this on the team structure level is that everyone gets to be an expert in their own space. Engineers on our team get to maintain strong ownership over the applications they’re responsible for. In tandem with this, we still do a significant portion of our upfront design with people across the team. This means that when we’re developing a design for a new project in any space, we’re always getting diverse perspectives and ways of looking at the problem we’re trying to solve.
