How Volie's Dev Team Is Scaling for the Future of Automotive

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Hello everyone. Welcome back to another Volley Rally. Today I'm sitting down with Antoine Obey from the software development team. Antoine, welcome back to Volley Rally.

Pleasure to be back.

So Antoine was on here about a year and a half ago, I would say. Sat down with Jake, just talked a little bit about himself and some projects that he had worked on at Bali. But so much has changed since then. So we wanted to sit down, talk with some developers in the upcoming weeks and just discuss where Volley is heading. So let's get started. When you first started with us, you were, you know, just doing coding. You were a straight up software developer. Now you've transitioned into a leadership role. How has your day to day changed since coming into that role?

Well, we went through sort of two iterations of change. We went from being just kind of a flat structure with our CTO and then the team, and then we kind of broke up into little pods for about a year, had team leads for each of those, like three to four person pods. And recently we've sort of taken all those people that work on the main core app, which were kind of all those pods, and put them all under one team. Now people have areas of expertise and all that within that, but we've kind of flattened that under me as far as my day to day change. I still code quite a bit, which is great because I still like programming, but I find myself having to just kind of hop in with people, help them out with code, kind of share domain knowledge and, and also just do some main structure organization things like facilitate standups, disseminate documentation to the team, implement processes and make sure that people are just doing those new processes, which is, you know, change is hard, but you got to just do those things in order to become a more organized and efficient team.

Yeah. What has changed or maybe even stayed the same culture wise amongst the devs with these changes?

Yeah, this team is just incredibly helpful. We have a few very concentrated slack channels where people can ask questions and everyone's just so incredibly helpful. And I've also just never worked on a team where just everyone's nice. Yeah, which is maybe surprising, but I feel like everyone is incredibly nice and a team player and willing to review each other's poll requests, give, give each other feedback and just like learn from each other because we all have, you know, a different set of skills and strengths.

I think that's kind of the consensus every time I get to sit down and guest host for Jake and, and sit down and do these with our internal people. Mostly that's the Consensus is everybody just loves who they work with and it makes the work environment so positive and so easy to show up every day. And you know, sometimes you feel the long days, but the long days don't feel quite as long because, you know, you love what you're doing, but you also love who you're doing it with. So that's awesome. And I love that that's stayed the same as the structure of the team has changed. So that's awesome. You guys just sat down leadership wise and got to sit down and talk some things out. Tell me a little bit about that if you can.

You know. So our main goal is to get the most amount of value into our customers hands as fast as possible and get new products pushed out that are innovative and also just help them do their jobs even better than they already can with Volley. And also enable our customer success team to do things like be able to support all of our accounts and to do that via internal tools and things that make their work efficient and not having to go through, you know, 100 accounts, changing a setting and just being able to click a button that does all of them at once sort of thing. So we sat down and focused on just how we organize the dev team to iterate and have that code go out as quickly as possible, while also making sure that it's well tested and we're doing it in a way that just makes sense for the team and keeps everybody happy. So, you know, our new strategy is going to be we've been doing sort of month long sprints of work. We're going to condense those into sort of shorter amounts of work and really try to give break chunks of work down even more for people so that we're not submitting these massive amounts of work. The smaller amounts of code you can produce and test, the less bugs you're going to push out. Right. Because if you have this giant amount of code that you know you're trying to test all at once, it's just more prone to bugs.

Yeah, that makes sense.

So yeah, just streamlining the process of how the dev team works and also enabling people to push code to production without having to wait to do it, you know, so creating automated systems that test our code to make sure that when we do push something out that it doesn't break anything and enabling developers and empowering them to, you know, feel confident to do that themselves.

So yeah. What can you tell us about some upcoming innovations? Things that we should be on the lookout for both from an employee side, like you're Talking about, you know, our customer success team, what are some things they should be looking out for, but also for our. For our customers.

Yeah, I'll start with our customers because our most exciting thing coming up, I would say, is we have a reporting platform that will be launching. Volley has up to date kind of taken on the data analytics portion of our platform sort of within Bali, and we've kind of created this whole new data pipeline which will standardize data and make it a little bit more homogeneous for our customers and making sure that they can also customize those reports how they want to see fit.

Right.

Because each one of our dealers operates slightly differently, have different needs and want to see different metrics for their agents and their bdc. So just really allowing that flexibility because the more visibility they have into what work their agents are doing, the more productive they can be. And that's really what we're, we're all about, so that's really exciting. Also, some small changes to Pulse. We've redone our whole alert structure, so there'll be some, some fun stuff rolling out and we have nada in a couple weeks. So it'll be fun to go to NATO with some of these new, new toys for us to show off.

I'm excited for you guys and it should, it should turn out to be a really good, a really good show this year for sure. Speaking more about you personally in your role at Volley, what's something that, you know as you've grown alongside the company's growth in the last almost two years that you've been with us now, what's the biggest lesson that you maybe even had to learn the hard way through your role?

You know, with the word engineering and software engineering, there's just this aspect of being a builder that inherently means mistakes and constant learning. If you're a developer and you're not learning something almost daily, then, I mean, especially in this day with AI, like, you're. You're not going to be in the job too long. So just having the mindset of really a, it's okay to fail because I watch our most experienced developers fail and with, with humility and being humble and just fixing their mistakes and not doing it again. So just kind of being okay in that world of, of uncertainty a little bit and just doing your best and constantly learning is something that has kind of stuck with me.

So, yeah, I love that you have to be comfortable with being uncomfortable. And if, like you said, I mean, if you're not, if you're not making mistakes, you're not Learning and you're not growing. So is that something that maybe you would go back and say to your younger self, like, you know, starting out at Volley two years ago, is that something you would say looking back, like, hey, don't be afraid to, to do this and make mistakes and you know, like you said, like approach it in a humble perspective and, and learn from it and move on. Or is there maybe something else that looking back, you wish you would have known then?

H. That's a good question. Something I would have. Wish I would have known then. Well, you know, I think we transition. We are very much in the midst of a pretty big transition. The way that developers work, that is with AI tooling. Now there's companies out there that, you know, have banned AI tooling, which I think is a mistake personally, but really embracing those tools as a way to learn because, you know, five years ago you had to Google something and hope that somebody had written something about it on a website and find that website, which was an art in and of its own. And nowadays you have the ability to have a conversation with essentially the entire Internet and even more, you know, it can produce things for you. So learning to leverage those tools, because I think at first when you're a newer developer, you're scared that these, you know, just having something do it for you is going to rob you of the, of the learning aspect of it. And you don't want to become a developer that doesn't know what you're doing, essentially. So really learning to use those tools in a way that you're where you're curious when it outputs code that you're uncertain of, to ask questions of it and to take the time to learn that and essentially become a really high level code, a person who can proofread code very, very well, which is an amazing skill to have. So just not just not being afraid of using those tools in the correct way, but also just knowing how to use them.

Yeah, absolutely. Wendy and I got to go to a conference in San Francisco back in September and one of the presentations that we saw while we were there was talking about, you know, AI and they were talking about it from a marketing perspective, but I feel like it applies to software engineering as well. You know, when photography was invented, artists thought they were out of work, but all they did was adapt. And artistry has not gone away over the years, it's just thrived in other forms, you know, and now we have film and all those things. And so, you know, if you don't learn to adapt with the Tools that come out, then you know you're just going to be left behind. So it definitely plays into what you're talking about. There won't come a time where we're not going to need coders. If anything, we probably need them more now than we ever did before. But like you said, what's going to give you the advantage over everybody else is knowing how to work alongside these tools, make them work for you, to make sure that you're, you know, as good at your job as you can possibly be. So what excites you the most about, about things that are coming up? What's, what's something that you know, you're really looking forward to?

Well, I mentioned the reporting platform. You know what I'm really just looking forward to is seeing this team, A lot of these, a lot of our developers are just incredibly talented and we have a lot of people, myself included, that were hired on as just as brand new developers out of a boot camp, you know, having never worked professionally. So just. This might be kind of corny but just like continuing to learn from everybody and seeing everybody like grow as a developer has been is really rad and more autonomy for the team to be able to push code and be confident in what they're pushing. And yeah, everyone here should be proud of the work they do. We put out really, really amazing stuff and yeah, absolutely. That's not a non answer but no,

no, I think it, I think it answered it for sure. It doesn't necessarily have to be, you know, a project specific thing just in terms of things to look forward to with the company and you know, I, I would say something similar to you if I was asked that question. You know, just watching my department grow and getting to learn new things and learn from the other people that you know, either come into my department or that are already there and just you know, getting to, to grow alongside the company because Volley is such an incredible company to get to be a part of. So yeah, I guess I will say

just one more thing that is exciting is, you know, when I first started Volley here at Volley, it was really just, we were just a Software platform for BDCs and we have just seen how much value we can provide for the entire dealership and really hopefully expanding into other areas of the dealership. You know, truly getting involved in more of the sales BDC side of things. Truly getting involved in just, you know, helping the entire dealership succeed, not just the BDC and having those two entities work like cohesively together. So yeah, absolutely, look forward to, like, seeing as, like, a business growing exciting.

So, yeah, this just Volley in itself is. I mean, there is so much more that is coming for the company that is coming, you know, in terms of products that are related to the company, that are going to fall under the Volley intelligence umbrella, that are going to be their own separate entity. There's. There's so much coming. It's. It's going to be crazy to see if we sat down again in a year, it would be crazy to think about just how much has changed, you know, in that time period. So, yeah, let's do it, for sure. Well, thank you so much for sitting down with us today. This was. This was awesome. So glad that we got to do this. You know, the development team really is the backbone of. Of what we get to do here. And, you know, you guys aren't someone that the customers get to see very often, because what they're able to do with their dealerships and, you know, and what we're able to do with the company, it's because of all the hard work that. That you guys put in. And so we thank you for that.

Well, we appreciate that. And we'll return back to our dark basements.

Well, thank you so much for sitting down today with us and for everybody else watching. Have a fantastic day.

All right, thanks.

See you.