School Yard Rules: How We Build Teams at Salsita

At Salsita, we talk about building your “Dream Team” of engineers and software experts. Most software houses promise something similar, so I figured I’d expound on exactly what it means and what a client can expect when working with Salsita.

Griffin W. Trent - Product Manager

Table of Contents

Think back to 1992 Olympic Basketball - beautiful time for the game, am I right? Jordan, Bird, Barkley, Johnson, Pippen, and others—aka "The Dream Team"—all took a little vacation from the NBA to head over to Barcelona and develop some amazing software.

Alright, that’s not exactly what they did, but here at Salsita, we talk about building your “Dream Team” of engineers and software experts. It’s an easy claim to make and most software houses promise something similar, so I figured I’d expound on exactly what it means and what a client can expect when working with Salsita.

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UX LEAD

We include a UX lead first on every team that we put together. We rely on them to be the point person when we have to figure out complicated flows, conduct user testing, and advise the team on how to resolve tricky UX conundrums. Our UX team has really expanded in the last year as we have increasingly encouraged our clients to save time and money by considering UX early in the lifecycle of their projects.

The UX team consistently creates beautiful and creative interfaces while tackling some very complex UX use cases. We have seen a significant decline in rework as well as shorter timelines due to adding a dedicated UX designer to each project.

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FULL-STACK ENGINEERS

Our bench is extremely deep here at Salsita. We have over 40 Computer Science grads, most of them with a Masters or PhD, and we know how to attract and retain top talent. We hire veterans and we’re proud of our comprehensive hiring process, which involves tests, interviews,  and of course, coding (it takes approximately five hours total).

Each engineer has a specialty and they’re all Javascript pros. We build our teams by considering product requirements and matching up the right people for the job based on their expertise, so you know you’re getting a team specially chosen for your requirements and what you need to pull off.

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TECH LEADS

These guys are our battle-tested veterans. Most of them have been working with the latest technologies since the early 2000s, so even our “greenest” tech leads have been at the forefront of software development for over 10 years. This really makes a difference when you have complicated solutions to build, new technologies to master, and a team to lead.

We also make sure that our tech leads communicate well with clients and external engineers so that they can be the backbone of the whole tech team and lead on to victory. Our tech leads have also worked with a broad range of engineers across our company and others, so these talents know each other and already have established best practices and relationships.

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QA ENGINEERS

The Salsita QA team specializes in writing automated tests as well as hunting and obliterating bugs. Our QA engineers work closely with both UX designers and full-stack engineers to have a detailed overview of what your software should do. They aren’t only searching for bugs but also for funky UX, missed requirements, and incomplete stories. Our Selenium and Cypress experts also provide a ton of support to external dev teams when they need it because they’re the real MVPs.

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UI ENGINEERS

Our UI team works closely with our UX designers to build the vision that our UX designers and clients put together. Much like our full-stack engineers, our UI engineers each have a specialization, but all of them are CSS magicians. That means that we can create slick custom interfaces and often make your software behave in ways that would stump most other teams.

We also choose the UI engineers for your project based on the specific requirements for the project which allows the work to get done faster and the prototypes and implementation to be very tightly coupled.

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PROJECT MANAGEMENT

Our project managers are the clients’ primary point of contact throughout the lifecycle of the project. Our PMs play a support role for the whole “dream team” and ensure that strategy and timing are clear and well communicated. They are from four different countries, have plenty of experience running and delivering projects, and all speak excellent English (most are native speakers) as well as at least one other language.

Our project management team meets bi-weekly to discuss strategy, share best practices, and improve our process. Our PMs each have different strengths as well as the whole PM team to back them up, so we do our best to match our PMs with the specifics of the project.

DEVOPS

Seriously, where would we be without our backboard? Our DevOps team sets up all of the deployment pipelines, keeps our build process healthy, and also acts as a super-admin over each project.

Our DevOps team tends to sneak around in the background, but the whole game wouldn’t work without them. These guys build the magic behind each project and they’re the ones we run to when we encounter any type of hurdle that stumps our team.

At Salsita, we build the team for your project based on their background and expertise juxtaposed with the exact needs of the project. It’s important that any new product team that we put together buys into the business case and long-term goals of a project before we begin writing any code.

If a client is unsure of the full scope and the needs of the project, our UX leads and PMs are happy to help figure that out so that we can put the right people on the job... and ultimately help your project win the gold!

JavaScript EngineeringProject ManagementCompany Culture

Griffin W. Trent - Product Manager

AKA Gustav - Project manager from Tennessee - Trying to speak Czech while retaining some level of English - Interested in what makes teams tick


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