OpenClassrooms

Solveig Bougeois is Engineering Manager at OpenClassrooms. After ten years as a math tutor on her personal time, she was drawn to the company’s mission-driven approach to education. Today, she is responsible for the development roadmap and making sure resources between the different engineering teams are optimally allocated.The lifelong joy of teachingAs a teenager, I was bad at math but I really enjoyed the problem-solving aspect. I got a lot of help from my teachers. When I did my engineering degree at university, I wanted to do something back, so I started tutoring math to highschoolers. I taught for ten years until I felt kind of stuck, but I still wanted to help people.A few years later, I found OpenClassrooms.&nbsp;It’s such a mission-driven company. I really know why I'm here, and I'm reminded of it once every one or two month when a new student will come to us with a challenge they were facing in their career — either with their existing one or the one they converted themself into. That’s when you remember how valuable the mission is, and how it feels great to help people learn and advance in their life. There are so many different paths, it’s very enriching.Growing into a leadership roleI didn’t aim to become a manager that soon—the opportunity just presented itself when I was working at my previous company, which was a startup. At the time, a senior engineer was promoted as manager, but it was clear he didn't enjoy this role. He was a brilliant engineer and technical expert, but not a great manager. It was really frustrating, because I could see what he was trying to do. So then I decided to ask my CTO to let me have a try. I wanted to do it because I wanted to improve the team and how we work with other teams. I liked it because It was different. At some point, I had to choose: do I want to continue to code or do I want to be a manager? I chose to be a manager because I knew I would always have my development background to understand the team.My role as engineering manager at OpenClassrooms is to manage the development team. I focus on three things. First, that there is a clear roadmap enabling the various squads to deliver results, work on the platform and improve the user experience. Second, I guide the developers on a day to day basis and help them in their career growth, also making sure they have the right resources. For that I work closely together with the other engineering managers. And third, I’m constantly engaging with the communities that have formed around our three charters—backend, front-end, iOS—inspiring them to write blog articles, speak at conferences, and work together with other departments on technical projects.&nbsp;I feel very supported in my current role. I have plenty of help from the other managers. Our leadership team—consisting of the head of quality, the head of product design, head of the solutions management, VP of Business Technology—works together a lot to exchange and promote good practices. I’m also supported by the CTO, who always encourages my initiatives and what I want to bring to the team. In terms of personal career growth, I have access to all courses we have internally plus,&nbsp; large communities and go to conferences to meet other tech leaders. This is part of the culture—we are a school and we want to help people to learn, also within the company. We are always encouraged to develop our skills and competences.Onboarding to hit the ground runningWe have quite a comprehensive onboarding process for new recruits. On day one, there is a huge “meet your team” event — today there’s 40 of us, so it's not always easy to remember each face and name. During the first two weeks you have an onboarding session with the CTO, and with various engineering, tech leaders and product managers, so you can get an overview of every department. Then you get the first objectives for the month, which involves committing, pair coding, presenting and communicating with your squads. It is super important to quickly feel included and take on tasks as fast as possible.&nbsp;I’m super proud of our onboarding plan, because when I joined I worked a lot with the leadership team to improve it. I love this subject. We now have a template page for all the tech teams, with dedicated sections for backend, frontend, solution managers, quality engineer and everyone else.&nbsp;Plenty of opportunities for upskillingIn our engineering team, we have a competency grid, which is a base, and we have different levels. For each level you have various requirements—so if it’s development, your core skills will be technological and maybe some DevOps or testing competencies for example. Basically you have every T-shaped skills, so if you’re doing an interview there will be HR skills. So you get guidelines for improving current challenges or move on to the next one. We typically investigate the problem, and if there is an OpenClassrooms course on the specific challenge we offer it. If that resource doesn’t exist, we hire external training. We also have something called ‘the lesson learned’, which is an honest evaluation when things don’t work out. It allows us to improve as a team, review our processes, etc.Bilingual working cultureAt OpenClassrooms, we have a pretty even split between French and English in the engineering team. Whenever we recruit new roles, we expect them to speak and understand English. However, some of our teams are really French-language oriented because the OpenClassrooms school started in French, so all the follow ups with the French students take place in French. But even if the predominant language in that specific team will be French, they will transition to English as soon as there are non-French speakers present. Still, we are working on making our team even more international. Today, all our official communications, every presentation we have, is a combination of French and English.&nbsp;In terms of working style, we are really hybrid. In non-pandemic times, we have people in Paris, London and New York who have the possibility to go to the office each day, in other smaller cities we provide co-working places, while others are 100% remote. All our stand ups and most meetings are video-conferences, and this is a detail, but all our cameras are on because we want to see each other. We also try to create informal meeting opportunities, for instance over coffee breaks, where we can discuss non-work related topics.

“It feels great to help people learn and advance in their life”

Julien Londeix