Zuhlke, an international software consultancy, has ambitious plans to become a major player within Greater Manchester's tech sector.
For that reason, we wanted to catch up with Zuhlke’s Software Engineer, Anna Slastnikova to discuss the company’s culture, and goals for the future.
Could you please tell me a little bit more about Zuhlke as an organisation and your goals as a business?
Zuhlke is a software consultancy with a rich history of helping clients in different businesses and sectors across Europe. Founded in Switzerland, we now have 14 offices across Europe and Asia, with two of them in the UK: London and Manchester. The main goal for us is really helping our customers to achieve their goals; our motto “Empowering Ideas” is all about this. We believe that every customer is different and every project is unique, with its own potential and challenges. In general, we've got four key solutions we offer: digital and mobile solutions, digital at scale, cloud migration and internet of things. In Manchester, we are quite new actually: We’ve been around for five years now and I was in since pretty much the beginning. It was great seeing the Manchester office grow – in fact we doubled in size in the last six months while maintaining a friendly atmosphere and engaging everyone in different sorts of activities. The main goal now is for Manchester to grow further, hire more talent and win local projects. It is actually quite exciting to be the part of the team at this stage as it feels like we can get really creative in looking for opportunities and working together. It is not an understatement to say that our Manchester office has got its own Northern spirit.
And could you tell us a little bit about your role in all that?
I'm a software engineer and have been with Zuhlke for around four years. At Zuhlke, we tend to work in self organised, interdisciplinary teams. This means there are always plenty of opportunities to try yourself in different roles and in different contexts. There is always a lot of learning going on. Our approach to working with customers involves listening to their needs and acting to implement things in the best possible way for them. This usually involves story-mapping sessions, creating a backlog and then prioritising it to work alongside our customer. Whatever the project, we try to make sure that whether you are an engineer or a project manager, you are collaborating with customers a lot.
What has been your favourite project that you've worked on at your time at Zuhlke and why?
My favourite project was with one of our local Manchester clients, a consumer data analytics company. The project was about building a microservices platform for company products as well as internal products, it also included the deployment of the services, monitoring them and providing some security hardening. Why was it my favourite? Because it was a really beautiful collaboration between us and the customer – we really all acted as a whole unit.
Another reason why this project was so special is because we tried a lot of cool technologies like Google Cloud Platform and Kubernetes, and not just for the sake of it, but actually for the benefit to the customer and their developers. This project also gave me the chance to work with the infrastructure code, which I'm really passionate about.
As a result, we've built a strong relationship with this customer, which allowed us to win more work with them in different areas of the business.
What impact do you think COVID-19 will have on Zuhlke as a business on the wider sector?
It obviously has a huge impact on all of us and our ways of working. Of course, everybody is now working remotely, which has been a dramatic change for the industry. Luckily, everyone at Zuhlke seemed to adapt really quickly and fortunately, we already had experience with distributed teams thanks to our collaboration with colleagues across Europe. Some of our colleagues were faced with new challenges such as remote ideation and discovery work, but these challenges were overcome as we’ve adapted along the way and we always share our learnings with other colleagues and then our clients, too.
Can you describe the working culture at Zuhlke, and what does the organisation do to attract and maintain talent?
Teamwork is really important at Zuhlke. It allows us to share a lot of knowledge easily, both within the UK and also with our other offices. This helps us to run software in organised and interdisciplinary teams. Another really important thing is support. This is achieved by getting regular feedback from your colleagues, as well as your line manager.
We also have regular appraisals and it really helps to set some goals and actually achieve them and try some things which you even haven't thought about before.
Also, during lockdown, our colleagues have run online talks on topics such as resilience, which has been really helpful both for work and personal life.
Another thing, Zuhlke is always looking at new technologies to make sure our offering is relevant. We have teams that are constantly analysing upcoming trends in technology and make sure we consider these in our capability planning.
We also invest in our people by providing budget and time for training purposes to ensure our teams are up to date in terms of their knowledge and skills and never stop learning. As a part of our training time, we run a special Zuhlke UK event – our annual Camp – where both UK offices gather for three to five days and hold an internal conference, including talks of different kinds, working on some fun projects together, or learning something new in teams.
What do you think the technology sector will look like in Manchester in 10 years’ time? And what role will Zuhlke hope to play in the ecosystem?
I think Manchester already has a really cool scene with lots going on in terms of events, activities and initiatives like DevOps meetups and Lean In Circles and many more.
What will happen in the future? I'm sure that Manchester’s tech community will carry on thriving. I think if these groups join up and collaborate then we can do some important tech for good work, in many areas such as transport or education.
As for Zuhlke, we want to be contributing to that. Our goal is to grow our brand and client base in Manchester, and subsequently attract more talent too. Our goal is to work with clients to complete many successful projects within the region.
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