Sergey Shishkin

Business Agility

What’s the point of a high-performing agile development team, if the product backlog for the next two years is set in stone?

Studies in complex adaptive systems show that businesses need to learn to respond to complex world by probing and sensing, rather than analyzing. While successful innovative products look like magic, they’re fruits of deliberate work and experimentation. Design Thinking, Human-Centered Design and Design Sprint consistently help sensing market needs, formulating and executing experimental probes in a lean way.

Psychological safety is a prerequisite for organizations to start turning failures into learnings and learnings into successes.

Technical Excellence

Great technology contributes significantly to speed of delivery. Great use of technology even more so!

Technology buzzwords of the day matter only if they bring measurable net-positive effect on the organization. Strategic Domain-Driven Design helps tackle technical debt where it matters most. Observability supports data-driven decision making. CI/CD automation reduces risk of failures and shifts left quality and security controls. Cloud and serverless infrastructure align IT costs with revenue growth and make experimentation cheaper.

On top of that, continuous and sustainable pace of technology innovation attracts and retains top talent. And that feeds into self-reinforcing positive cycle.

Consulting

During over two decades in the IT industry I’ve worked in small startups and regulated multi-national corporations. In the end of the day, everyone wants to ship better products cheaper and faster. Although every team and situation is different, there are good practices worth knowing. On top of that teams and organizations need to establish an adaptable culture that can deal with changing circumstances without much drama. If your organization is stuck in a transformation, I can help you out.

Arrange 1 free consulting session with me: drop me a note describing what you need help with.

Development

I develop rapid prototypes and large-scale high-quality software systems using modern cloud-native technologies on Node/JS and JVM. I’m functional programming enthusiast, polyglot programmer and work throughout the application stack:

• automation of cloud infrastructure provisioning;
• robust and scalable back-ends and event-driven data pipelines;
• modern responsive Web UI and data visualization;

I value simple, pragmatic solutions and automation of repetitive and error-prone tasks like testing and deployment.

Architecture and Code Review

Skeptical of silver bullet solutions, I offer solutions tailored to socio-technical background of the organization. My expertise covers:

• Systems architecture assessment;
• Plan architecture evolution to support business and tech strategy;
• Code quality reviews and technical debt assessment;
• Facilitate participatory technical decision making based on data;
• Identify and mitigate performance and scalability issues.

Interim Technical Leadership

Great technology teams deliver with consistently high quality. Engineering culture has a flywheel effect and forms either virtuous or vicious cycle. I can help you seed and grow top technology teams or turn around challenging projects. Through coaching and mentoring practice I foster engineering excellence and continuous improvement culture.

Training

I enjoy sharing my knowledge with others and am available for in-house and online trainings. Topics include:

• Solution Focused Team Retrospectives;
• Lean Architecture;
• Serverless;
• and more.

Coaching

Coaching is partnering with clients in a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximize their potential. As a coach I don’t diagnose or prescribe solution but invite you to explore different perspectives and build skills and resilience of your own.

I’m trained solution-focused coach (by Academy of Solution Focused Training), Certified Solution-Focused Practitioner (IASTI) and Co-Active coaching practitioner (CTI).

Arrange 1 free coaching session with me: drop me a note introducing yourself and your goals.