Nicole Hammond: Hi, everyone. Thank you so much for joining us today for another episode of Hiring Happy Hour. Um, I am grinning cheek to cheek because this man is core to SmartRecruiters. Um, he has been here forever, but that's not the reason. He has made such an [00:01:00] impact at this organization, and a topic that may not be familiar to all of us, but is truly important in today's world and where the world of work is going. He is a quiet architect. His fingertips are all over an entire industry shift towards AI, even though he's never chasing the spotlight for it. He's been with SmartRecruiters since the early days. He joined as one of the company's first engineers back when the whole team could fit around a table. I'm sure that's bringing good memories. Over a decade later, he's still there, having helped steer the product through every major shift, every, every major shift, including the early, unglamorous bet on AI first hiring tools, years before anyone else was talking about it. His impact hasn't gone unnoticed. He was named Most Valuable Employee of the Year in 2017, and Leader of the Year in 2019, and under his watch, the platform has [00:02:00] been named a strategic leader in the Fosway Nine Grid for talent acquisition four times, four times running. SVP of Engineering at SmartRecruiters, please join me in welcoming Michal Nowak. Michal, I am so happy to welcome you to the show.
Michal Nowak: Oh, wow. Thank you so much, Nicole. Now I'm, I'm blushing. A super kind intro. Thanks for having me. Awesome to be here
Nicole Hammond: Oh, see, now you're grinning cheek to cheek and red. I love it. That's, that is my goal. They write these and I just love sharing the accolades about each of you. You are fabulous. You are fabulous.
Michal Nowak: Thank you so much. Appreciate it
Nicole Hammond: Michal, you do so much for this organization and for the industry, and I think as we see the world going towards, uh, autonomous enterprise or AI or agentic, um, there is a lot behind the scenes.
And I share with a lot of people the reason I've stayed at SmartRecruiters for so long is our leadership, and that includes you, and that includes, you know, [00:03:00] having Rebecca from a product leader to a CEO, because it is so important to have that foundation behind the scenes. So I want you to share with our audience, and, you know, this may not be a common topic for our HRTA leaders, but pass it on to your product and R&D friends. what has been that hiring happy hour for you, that moment of impact that you are just very proud of?
Michal Nowak: Yeah, I mean, I've been here for, like, 14 years now. It's gonna be 15 next year, so there's been a lot of these moments, a lot of these moments. But I think, like, a lot of things changed for SmartRecruiters after we shipped Winston, after, like, you know, the first versions of Winston went live. And to me as an engineering leader, uh, it was not about the release itself, like the product that we shipped.
I just loved how the team gather around this problem and how they respond to the challenge. I love how, how the team worked around the whole [00:04:00] Winston delivery, right? And that was like, you know, was not a si- a single moment. Like, it took us some time, but the way the team reorganized themselves and the way we just come up to it, that was, that was it.
That was really the, the spotlight for me
Nicole Hammond: I wanna share with our audience the story of Winston so that people understand, like, how quickly this evolved behind the scenes. Um, two years ago we launched Winston, but the year prior to that, maybe even less than a year,
Rebecca less than a year.
yeah, said, "Bring me your craziest ideas," right? Um, and Winston was part of that. so it came to be, right? She said, "We're doing it." And then Michal, I'm sure, like there was all kinds of feelings of, okay, doing it means what, right? Like, tell us what that looked like behind the curtain.
Michal Nowak: Yeah, exactly. Look, I mean, yeah, so, so first of all, we started with our old ro- roadmap. We had a plan. We had a, [00:05:00] we had an idea of what we want to build, and together with Rebecca, and Shiran, we looked at it and we concluded that that's not where the, future of hiring is. That's not what, true innovation is, and we, decided to cancel all of this, and we took three long months to, to basically figure out and, dream Winston So, you know, we had a lot of research, and we, we talked with so many customers that gave us so much great feedback and helped us shape the idea. And so that, that was like the first, um, big thing behind it. But then eventually, Winstone was born. We, knew that, hey, this is what we need to build. This is what, we're betting on.
we looked at the team, and we still have team organized like we used to have it, And we knew that in order to build Winston we need to, to change the setup. we cannot just build this entirely new experience and have, you know, our old team [00:06:00] structure. We need to respond not only with like technology, with product, but also with how we were organized ourselves.
So that was that trigger point that, you know, prompted us to, do the change.
Nicole Hammond: And so explain to our audience what the old structure looked like and what the future structure looked like.
Michal Nowak: Yeah. So, I mean, we followed, we thought we followed best practices. We, we had, like, a durable cross-functional team. So we always had, uh, product managers, designers, engineers working together in small teams and taking care of a part of a, a journey, right? Like, uh, scheduling, sending an offer, um, hiring flow.
And the folks were, or CRM, and folks were just working on that part of the product for a longer time, often, like, three, four years, and really going deep into that domain. So we had really passionate about that space. The problem with it was, the world around us start changing so fast, th- and, you know, the, the, the shifts were, so frequent and so big, we had to respond to that.[00:07:00]
And we noticed that even if we had a great opportunity ahead of us, something super exciting, something like a prototype that a customer loved, something that, you know, we thought is gonna bring revenue, bring a lot of value to the product, we had hard times convincing people to, abandon that product they spent, like, two, three years on working, that they loved evolving.
They had, heads full of ideas how to get it to the next stage. so it was hard for them to jump into another opportunity, even if that was a bigger opportunity. There's always friction with it. So we were thinking about, like, "Hey, what can we do about it?" And we decided that, you know, org change or, change in general, it shouldn't be like an event.
It should be a competence, right? It should be something that we, operationalize, something that we internalize, and be just better at it. we saw teams around us dropping the roadmaps. I [00:08:00] don't know, OpenAI is not planning for ... They, are not publishing a year or six months-long roadmap.
There's like, you know, there's, there's so much evolution going on that, you know, these cycles are getting shorter and shorter. we, thought that, "Hey, we need to do something to make sure that change is just our second nature and is a skill that we have, because most likely we're not gonna avoid it."
Nicole Hammond: Yeah. Yeah. I think this is important, and I think about where we're going now, and even having conversations with customers, educating them on this, right? Saying, "Hey, no matter what technology you're considering, here are some core things to think about. First and foremost, agentic," right? Things are going to naturally continuously change more often, um, and it's okay.
But you have to ensure adoption, you have to ensure man- governance, and you have to look behind the scenes at how R&D is set up to support those products, right? Because they have to be just as agile
Michal Nowak: Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. [00:09:00] And, and, you know, that's what we, that's what we thought about. Like, we look at our past and even, like, before AI, if you think about your team, h- have you ever been in a team that was just the same for three, four years? There's always some smaller or bigger shift. Someone is, uh, leaving, someone is joining.
Sometimes teams are growing and they're being split. Sometimes, you know, they're being merged.
Nicole Hammond: Yeah
Michal Nowak: if I look at, at my, you know, time in a professional career, sooner or later there was a change, right? So we thought, like, you know, it's, it's inevitable. It's only getting faster, so hey, we might as well be good at it and, and, you know, just make sure we, we can, we can do it in a, in the right way.
And, and we started doing this.
Nicole Hammond: So talk to us more about the shift from kind of this product silo to outcomes based, right? Now these teams are set up on [00:10:00] outcomes. Explain that to
Michal Nowak: Yeah. So on a high level, on that top level, it always starts with the product strategy. Uh, so like, you know, I am here to enable product strategy. Uh, so like, you know, the, the, the setup, the org structure always start with product goals, right? And we usually pick, depending on the team size, like at Winston time, we set like six big goals that we wanted to achieve, right?
So one of it was, "Hey, let's reduce time to first interview." The other one was, "Hey, let's, build an agentic apply process." And the third was, "Hey, let's improve our matching." then the next one would be, "Hey, let's start exposing, key recruiting activities through a conversational interface," right?
So like, you know, we had these goals, and we started with building groups around these goals. So we started with, "Hey, we're gonna, we're gonna chase these six goals." Then we picked, "Hey, who, who's gonna lead these goals?" So we pick leaders for them. And leaders, by leaders, I always mean [00:11:00] engineer, product manager, and designer.
We call it like a group triad.
And then, you know, that triad has a goal now, and they need software components to achieve it. So we were splitting our software components, and we were giving people components owner- ownership of these components so that they can fulfill their goal. And then once we had goals, their leaders, and components, we asked the team, "Hey, so where do you wanna work on?
Which, group sounds appealing to you?" And most of the people, choose in self-selected groups, right? So like, you know, the team just basically choose the, group that they found the most exciting or maybe where the components lived that they were familiar with. So we really had like-- We were really shocked how, how relative-- We were worried that might be a tough process.
There will be goals without, team behind it. It was really smooth, actually, and, people self-selected. And then we started, right? So that was that, you know, upper layer. And then, you know, we also [00:12:00] did some interesting things to how the group itself operate because that was, that was another shift.
Nicole Hammond: That is so cool. I think for our listeners out there, or watchers, first and foremost, right, having those outcomes. So think about your top three, six, nine outcomes, then that triad. I think that is core to success, right? Having that cross-communication, reliability, interdependency, and then choosing your adventure.
And that drives passion, that drives adoption, that drives ownership and accountability.
Michal Nowak: Also, like, you know, um, your resulting structure means that, hey, your top goals are, are being worked on, right? Basically, you have your key problems you wanna solve with, with people looking at it, right? So, like, you know, you're getting this structure where, where pe- where all of that is taken care of, right?
Caveat, there is a lot of software components that no one wanted because, you
Nicole Hammond: Yeah.
Michal Nowak: even though they were important, uh, no one needed them [00:13:00] to hit the goal, and we had to overcome. So, like, 30% of the, the software components we had, no one wanted them, so we had to tell the team, "Hey, listen, like, you know, I, I know no one needs them, but we need to maintain them.
We need to keep them up and running,
Nicole Hammond: For
Michal Nowak: so we're gonna distribute them evenly across these six groups so, like, you know, nothing is, gets left behind." And yeah, but people accepted. Like, everyone, like, understand this, so we, we had that done. Yeah.
Nicole Hammond: That's great. And what about tools, right? We're talking about this world of AI. What about the tools the team used
Michal Nowak: Ooh, I mean, the tool set, I mean, we obviously have our, uh, our tech stack that, um, that we always had. We st- we use, um, some new tools for discovery because we did so much discovery with our customers. And by the way, our customers are, customers are just amazing. They're always so gracious with their time, and they gave us so much feedback, [00:14:00] so much useful feedback.
Spent, like, long hours with us, uh, on those discovery sessions, and yeah, we did, I don't know, hundreds of these sessions. So we gathered so much material, uh, from the discovery that we needed, uh, good tooling to, uh, transcribe and analyze and, like, you know, um, catch up similarities and, and, you know, common pain points.
So AI is super, super helpful here and, and really, like, you know, w- we use Dovetail. Uh, this is our, like, you know, the discovery platform. It tremendously helped us with, with, you know, getting all these nuggets across all of these hundreds conversations, right? So, like, you know, that was that. And then of course, you know, um, when we were developing software, we, we of course, like, use, use tools like Cloud Code now, uh, to get, you know, the, the software out faster, to document it, to test it, to, like, you know, we're, we're just sprinkling the entire software development [00:15:00] life cycle with this tooling to, to make sure we're, um, delivering faster.
Uh, so yeah, that's, that's one side of the coin. But I think still, um, this is very impactful. Obviously, this is just changing how software engineering is being done, but I wouldn't, like, underestimate all the process interventions and, like, you know, process or ways of working changes, because they're still equally impactful as, you know, the AI tools that you would deploy.
Uh, and, and I just wanna urge everyone thinking, like, you know, "Hey, you know, the AI is the, the, the single most important thing you can do to your SDLC right now." You look at the research, if you, if you hear, like, you know, the ... Read the analysis. Process the ways of working changes are equally impactful to, like, speed of shipping software.
Nicole Hammond: Yep. So technology, process. Talk to us more about as we think about this transition to more outcomes-based, what are [00:16:00] some of those changes to process that you would highlight?
Michal Nowak: So that's that second layer, right? We started with, goals, product goals, leaders of these goals, groups around these goals, right? And, and, you know, that was, like, on a high level. Then we should look at how these groups operated.
Nicole Hammond: because
Michal Nowak: we wanted... That was the second big part of the changes we did.
Say you have 25 people in a group, and you want them to go fast. We figured out we're gonna create, uh, we're gonna divide them into short-lived small squads. A squad can be three, four, five people. They take a feature that helps achieve that big goal, and they run with it for six, seven, eight weeks, ship it to production, and then the squad is dissolved, and we create a new squad, and that does something else.
So [00:17:00] that was, like, one, one thing. We, we wanted these squads to be very dynamic,
relatively small, and do only one thing, one epic, one feature. So they don't, have low, we call it, like, WIP limit, work in progress limit, right? they only work on one thing, because that's where the speed comes from.
Like, you focus. And then the second, like, you know, uh, thing that we, uh, introduce is that oftentimes in, in engineering you have a lot of distractions. Like, I don't know, there's a bug coming in, or there's, like, some routine task you need to do, or you need to scale infrastructure. That work that basically drags you away from your core project that you need to deliver.
I'm sure, like, everyone knows, like, you know, there are, there are these things that are popping up here and there. So we created one dedicated squad to just handle that. We call it acceleration squad, and these guys were playing [00:18:00] defense. They were protecting all the other squads, and the other squads were playing offense.
They were shipping value. But that one squad, um, that is g- we call acceleration squad, was protecting everyone else, just making sure that everyone else is not distracted and can focus on, you know, on the work at hand. And of course, we knew that, you know, you cannot spend six months in a team like that only doing bugs.
Nicole Hammond: No.
Michal Nowak: is very draining, very stressful, you know? So that's why we planned that rotation. You know, you, you, you work in the delivery squad, you build your feature, the feature is out, and probably after that you would go to the, to this acceleration squad, and you would spend the, you know, next six, seven weeks there.
So we're rotating, uh, all the time, right? So we had that small, like, rotation on the, on the squad level, and then every six, nine months, we are looking at the roadmap and figuring out, "Hey, do we have new goals?" And we're going, like, a, doing a big regrouping, right? So, like, these two cycles are just happening all the time.
So yeah, these, these were the core concepts
Nicole Hammond: I wanna talk [00:19:00] about the people, right? I mean, this has been a transition for them. I
Michal Nowak: Oh, yeah
Nicole Hammond: we, we can talk behaviorally around COVID probably helped with change and adopting it more often and, and different things about it, but how have they responded to this? How has this motivated them?
I'm assuming it motivates them because is, this is insane. I can't think of a better word, but like constant change is something where mentally you need to be prepared for that. Um, so
Michal Nowak: Yes
Nicole Hammond: the people responded?
Michal Nowak: Ooh, it's a great question. Pros and cons, right? We... So f- couple of things. First of all, people felt like everyone's doing impactful job, and that was, like, you know, the, what we already immediately noticed, right? No one was doing second priority work. No one was, like, you know, left doing, you know, work that no one cared about.
Everyone did something important, right? Which is like, "Hey,"
Nicole Hammond: Awesome
Michal Nowak: probably, like, very important in everyone's job, right? Second thing, um, people really felt focused with these [00:20:00] acceleration squads. I mean, yes, l- being in an acceleration squad is draining, but, like, when you're not in it, you can truly focus, right?
And, and that was, like, you know, second piece of feedback that we got. And al- also, like, we thought, you know, these acceleration squads will be very, very hard, but many people actually choose to be there. They actually enjoy, like, making, you know, the system slightly better, fix these little things, you know, leaving, leaving the, the, the system better than they, they found it.
And also, like, newcomers, new engineers choose to go to the acceleration squads because, like, you know, fixing these bugs was a great way to, to learn about the system, about the domain, right? So they often choose that. So, you know, that was that. Uh, and yeah, everyone felt like it was st- just a faster setup.
Um, and, and we were able to deliver more. Of course, the, the, the, the drawback is you pay the initial penalty. After the big regrouping, everything changes. Like, we have new groups. They own new things. [00:21:00] Your, colleagues might change, right? So it always takes time to gel and to really get, the, groove together, and you always pay the penalty of doing so, right?
So it was really important for us to build a repeatable process around that, right? Just to make sure that we have playbooks for getting people together. But like, you know, the first two times we did this, ah, people, like, were telling you, "Look, I needed to learn the org, um, you know, uh, uh, from, from scratch.
Now I need to l- figure out where components are, how teams are being named," 'cause we're changing it, too, right? So you know, that, you need to pay that, that initial penalty, and you need to make sure that that penalty is as small as humanly possible. And then the other thing is, social connection. I mean, you're ending up with the new folks, right?
Uh, so you need to build that social connection again. And even if you're in a squad, you know, chances are six, seven weeks from now you're gonna finish your work, and you're gonna work with someone else, and some people [00:22:00] absolutely love it. Some people would want more stability, right? So we, didn't enforce, any hard rules on, like, "Hey, this needs to be six weeks and, six weeks only."
Some squads live a bit longer. And then we generally try to build social connection on the group level, because we knew squads will change all the time, so we tried, you know, these group leads that were running the, group. Their big part of the job is just to make sure everyone feels familiar. They're like, you know, "We're, we're not a b-" you know, a bunch of strangers, that we have familiar faces, build that connection on the group level, and then, you know, that, that, that squad bootstrap is, is easier, right?
So yeah, that, that was the thing. But I, I mean, lastly, I would say the, um, the fact that people knew that six, six months from now we will revisit the setup also make it like, you know, even if I'm not in a project that I absolutely lo- love right now, I can s- I know that six months from now the [00:23:00] setup will change, and I'll have another shot at trying something different.
So now people are encouraged to work with their managers and think about the next regrouping and what are the product areas they wanna work on. So as we go through that, you know, they're already thinking, "Hey, what should I do next?" Right?
Nicole Hammond: Yeah
Michal Nowak: And, and I, I think like, you know, every six, seven months, people have a shot at, at doing something new, and they're, like, using it, yeah
Nicole Hammond: that's awesome. And it's working, right? Let's talk about results. Let's talk about successes. I, in the go-to-market, talk all the time about credibility, and behind the scenes we have delivered on time. I think that is the number one success stat as we think about credibility as we move forward. But share with us some of kind of the milestones or, or successes that you see f- from this program
Michal Nowak: Yeah, I, I, I think, like, you know, we need to start with our customers and if they see value coming out from the team, right? [00:24:00] So, so that's always the, the most important thing, and it's, uh, you know, it can be measured differently, right? Through, like, you know, customer satisfaction. You can measure it by, like, analyst support.
You can, you can measure it through revenue, right, and business results. And I feel like all of that, you know, went up and, and, and we, we see, you know, generally customers being happier. Uh, we see business results behind it. So, like, you know, to me as an engineering leader, that, that's always, like, you know, the first questions that I'm asking, "Hey, how does it look like on, from the outside," right?
Nicole Hammond: Sure.
Michal Nowak: And then of course internally also, um, we measured a lot of things. So first of all, we retained, we keep very, very high retention, right? So, like, you know, even though that penalty that, you know, that, that, that cognitive load coming with all the change, we saw people really sticking with the company. We didn't lose our great engineers.
People really wanted to, to work on, and, and, you know, [00:25:00] retention numbers are great for the team,
Nicole Hammond: Yeah.
Makes me super proud, right?
Yeah
Michal Nowak: Uh, quality, um, didn't decrease. Actually got better, right? So like, okay, at least we know we didn't mess it up. And then we are calculating the speed, right, at it, which we run, and, and we, we look at, um, lead time.
So how much time, uh, goes from, "Hey, I have an idea," to a customer saying, "Thank you, that's a great feature," right? So, like, that time, that lead time, time to market is, is, is what got decreased. And then the last thing is throughput, so how many different, like, functionalities we're able to ship. Um, and yeah.
And even though, like, we jumped into this completely new experience because, like, you know, we went into, like, building more conversational experience, building more agentic flow, so, like, you know, the team just constantly needs to learn it. I think we, yeah, we kept shipping and, and we actually did, the speed of delivery went up.
So, like, overall we, we've been absolutely shocked at how well, uh, [00:26:00] this worked. And, and so, like, we kept doing it. We did it already four times and, and, you know, the, we did it also with our SAP colleagues because our team s- grew significantly recently, and we did it twice with, with our SAP colleagues that joined our team, and it, yeah, it worked with, with that new team, too, so.
Nicole Hammond: Mihail, you're being modest, but I will say, and I want to take this moment to give everyone in R&D and engineering and across the product teams a huge shout-out because you have overachieved and it has been so successful and we all recognize it. And so please
Michal Nowak: Appreciate it
Nicole Hammond: your next team meeting that you give them the kudos and the love from all of us, um, as it has been truly, truly impactful
Michal Nowak: Yeah. Thank you so much. Yeah, we've been blessed with great team. I, I, you know, I'm here for, for 14 years and, and I, I've been really blessed with [00:27:00] an amazing, with amazing people, very dedicated, really passionate about this space. Not just technologists, but also people that love that domain, wanna make, you know, impact to how recruiting is being done, how candidates have been taken care of, how, you know, recruiters do their job and, and w- and really care about, like, delivering value for, for, for the users, and they're really obsessed about it.
So yeah, that's, that's kudos to, to, to that team for sure
Nicole Hammond: last question. Where are we going from here? Like, as
Michal Nowak: Ooh
Nicole Hammond: about more agentic, uh, you know, all these concepts that are out there, what is ahead for you and your teams?
Michal Nowak: there's many different, um, paths or like areas where we want to take the product. Well, of course, we, we want to keep rethinking how recruiting is being done in that agentic world. Fortunately, recruiting is such a great space to deploy AI. Uh, it's such a [00:28:00] amazing, you know, area or, or domain where, uh, these new capabilities can really bring value.
And yeah, I mean, we- we're working hard on like decentralizing that work. We want to make sure basically that when we produce software right now, again, from a process perspective, whenever we see a problem, we by default are, are thinking about, "Hey, is, is just like agentic capability a good fit for it?" And we want to make sure like, you know, everyone is thinking about that.
So we're now distributing that work, and yeah, we already see a lot of, a lot of these areas like being, being worked on and, and, and being developed in, in, uh, in areas like applying, scheduling, um, first interview, shortlisting, um, offer flow. So many different things where, where we're trying to apply these concepts.
Nicole Hammond: Hmm.
Michal Nowak: so yeah, we're gonna keep, uh, building on top of Winstone. We're gonna keep making [00:29:00] Winstone smarter. Yeah
Nicole Hammond: There we go. I love it. I love it. thank you. This has been so insightful, and I think this is so powerful for organizations out there to better understand, um, R&D, engineering, product, whatever it may be called in your organization, and where the world is going. Um, I want to switch to more about you, Michal.
And don't blush. Don't blush. Um, I wanna learn more about your personal happy hour outside of work. What
makes you smile? What brings you joy? Um, what gives you balance?
Michal Nowak: there's many different things, uh, to share here. Um, yeah, but I think like in, in the past that was sport, and I, I was practicing taekwondo. I, I, I, I did some tournaments. I was never like a, a pro pro, maybe like a, a, a semi, semi-pro,
Nicole Hammond: you [00:30:00] were really good though.
Michal Nowak: I, I loved it, and I think like, uh, sport gave me a lot of confidence, and that translated then into business really. Um, so b- being a practitioner, showing up on trainings, uh, going to tournaments, sometimes losing, sometimes winning, and just getting through it, recovering from an injury. That was just, sport brought so much, uh, great things into like my, my confidence, resilience, uh, so many like, you know, like b- build character, uh, that, you know, then translated into, into professional life.
So that was one thing. And, and then I'm a father now, and I think like now nothing beats the moment where my kids are learning something new or doing something new together. Uh, and that's just so awesome. Uh, so yeah. I gotta tell you, like we're now, uh, with my [00:31:00] older kid, we're building Minecraft modifications in Claude Code, so he's just typing, "Hey, please change the game so that, you know, we have this new monster here that's spawning other monster," and Claude is just magically developing all of that, and we both have just so much fun doing this.
You
Nicole Hammond: my God.
Michal Nowak: I kid you not, it's amazing. It's so
Nicole Hammond: I love that. I thought you were gonna say Legos,
Michal Nowak: no, no. It's that, that ship has sailed, you know?
Nicole Hammond: So these are the things I have to look forward to with my boy.
Michal Nowak: Oh, definitely gotta try it out. Yeah
Nicole Hammond: That is awesome. Oh, great. Um, all right, my favorite part, this or that. You're familiar with this. You choose one, you choose both, you choose neither. You can elaborate.
We're gonna start with some related to your hiring happy hour, and then we're gonna switch into some fun personal ones. Uh, you
Michal Nowak: Okay. Ready
Nicole Hammond: Okay. Org stability or constant evolution?
Michal Nowak: Constant [00:32:00] evolution.
Nicole Hammond: AI as a tool or AI as a teammate?
Michal Nowak: Ooh, both
Nicole Hammond: All right. Teach people new tools or change how they think about the way of work
Michal Nowak: all change how they think about and they can learn from that themselves.
Nicole Hammond: the fun part, right?
Michal Nowak: Yeah
Nicole Hammond: Five priorities or one ruthless priority
Michal Nowak: Ooh, ooh. Uh, One Ruthless by far. Yeah
Nicole Hammond: best coder or best problem solver?
Michal Nowak: Problem solver. Yeah, for sure
Nicole Hammond: Annual planning or continuous reprioritization
Michal Nowak: I guess both. Yeah, you need to, you need to have a frame. Uh, you need to have at least, like, you know, some long-term thinking. Maybe not annual, maybe, you know, biannual. And then,
Nicole Hammond: All right
Michal Nowak: as you learn, you change, you know? But,
Nicole Hammond: you're the
Michal Nowak: you need to have some north stars
Nicole Hammond: human-built software or human-directed software?
Michal Nowak: [00:33:00] Ooh, uh, more and more directed, I would say. Yeah
Nicole Hammond: Love it. All right, now we're gonna switch to the easy ones, more about you. Um, mountains or ocean, Nihal?
Michal Nowak: Mountains, big time. Yeah
Nicole Hammond: Sunrise or sunset?
Michal Nowak: Sunrise
Nicole Hammond: Okay. Coffee or tea?
Michal Nowak: Oh, coffee. 100 times coffee.
Nicole Hammond: You did
Michal Nowak: Coffee is a bicycle for the brain, you know? This
Nicole Hammond: you're not sleeping.
Michal Nowak: Is... Yeah
Nicole Hammond: much.
Michal Nowak: Hard on coffee. Decaf. Decaf in the evening. Yeah
Nicole Hammond: okay, okay. Um, vacation or staycation?
Michal Nowak: Ooh, vacation.
Nicole Hammond: Okay.
Michal Nowak: Va- vacation in the mountains
Nicole Hammond: I'm add- I'm adding this one now. Um, sports or Minecraft? Like, this is the coding.
Michal Nowak: sports. I love Minecraft, but sports. Sports, yeah. Not, yeah, we shouldn't overdo Minecraft
Nicole Hammond: beer, wine, or a spirit?
Michal Nowak: this will sound weird, alcoholic, but probably all [00:34:00] of this. Depends on occasion, you know?
Nicole Hammond: I
love that answer. You know that
Michal Nowak: there's time for spirit, there's time for wine, there's time for beer. Just need to, like, just need to be responsible
Nicole Hammond: Yes, yes. Agreed. Michal, one of my favorite moments is when we were in Krakow at the offsite and you had one of these three in your hand, and you brought us all together in that countryside and you did a cheers. And, uh, I will never forget it. It was just the rally of the people and it was my first time,
Michal Nowak: Uh
Nicole Hammond: that beautiful country.
Uh, it was fabulous. So
Michal Nowak: Oh, it's a great gig. Yeah.
Nicole Hammond: uh, it was, it was wonderful. It was wonderful. But I just wanna say cheers to you and thank you for being on the show. Um,
Michal Nowak: you so much
Nicole Hammond: can people connect with you, Michal? Where can people talk to you more about this topic if they're interested in influencing their organization or have questions?
Michal Nowak: Yeah. I mean, the best way would be LinkedIn. Feel free to connect, uh, start a chat. We can always go from there. Um, yeah, so, so if you are [00:35:00] interested in any of these concepts, I love to exchange thoughts on, on that. Um, if you would like to compare notes, uh, hit me up on LinkedIn and let's have a conversation.
Nicole Hammond: And he's honest, he's true, he'll do it. He is one of the best, one of the best. Um, thank you Michal for being here. Thank you for
Michal Nowak: Thank you, sir
Nicole Hammond: this insight. I think it's important in today's world, and truly is a differentiator as we move forward. Um, thank you everyone for listening or watching. Um, I hope you learned something.
I hope this impacts you or influences you to learn more about R&D, uh, and the other side, or what's under the hood. Um, and please share this with your friends. Share this with all of those engineers, and ask them if this is something that they've thought about. Uh, this has been another episode of Hiring Happy Hour, and we will see you again soon
Michal Nowak: Thank you so much, Nicole. Thanks for having me. Thanks for all the kind words. Appreciate it
[00:36:00]