At the core of any company is its people. Our Meet the BitBakers series introduces you to the people who help bring our clients' visions to reality every day.
Day in and day out, our team of designers and developers support our clients on a variety of projects. This work varies from providing an entire embedded group to support an internal development team or working as an entire tech team to design and develop a new product.
There's more than simply design and dev work when we're working as a tech team. We're working as the product and project managers to ensure the result exceeds the vision. Leading the charge is Daniel MacKenzie, our Director of Product.
We sat down with Daniel to learn more about his role at BitBakery, his startup experience, and why he chose BitBakery.
As Director of Product, what's a typical day look like for you?
It's an exciting role in what we do at BitBakery here because our product isn't an app. Our product is the projects we're doing for our clients. There's a fair amount of project management across many concurrent projects—essentially managing the developers working on it, the clients, and stakeholders to ensure we understand what they need, their timelines, and addressing any third-party integrations. There are projects where I pitch in to do actual development work too. The role covers a lot of bases—product management, client management, and project management.
How did you get started working in tech?
I'm a developer by trade. I graduated from the University of Waterloo with a computer science degree, and all my co-op placements were in development roles. I was able to take electives in business, making up my own kind of business and computer science mixed degree, which was fun and engaging. The intersection of business and technology has always been fascinating for me.
My management experience comes from running a startup for seven years that I co-founded while still in school. I was also the primary developer for a solid amount of time there. On the business side, you have to be able to deliver technical ideas to different stakeholders and clients. You're hiring devs and managing them. You're trying to define and build a product. It gave me a lot of the experience I use today.
Daniel and some of the BitBakery team at the annual Alert Labs Earth Day cleanup in Downtown Kitchener.Are there similarities between building a startup and your role at BitBakery?
There are a lot of parallels—especially in the sense of how many hats we wear. There's also a need to be able to shift gears quickly between projects. The ones I'm working on now cross three business domains, from healthcare to insurance to real estate. We have to have an understanding of what worlds and challenges the clients are working in.
On the work side, you're trying to balance your time management from running projects to jumping in and coding if needed. Knowing how to shift those priorities around and having a flexible mindset is relatable and applicable here at BitBakery.
Product Management is a popular career path for many people in tech, but an outsourced development company like BitBakery might not be the first choice. Why is BitBakery an exciting place for you to work and grow your career?
One of the things that gets me excited is solving real problems that have an impact on customers and clients. I had some experience in Product Management, so when this opportunity came up, I saw it as an opportunity to develop those skills.
At the end of the day, the products I'm managing are our services. We're not actually building a product ourselves and selling it to a customer base. What we offer is all the work and service that we provide. It's the processes we use to design, develop, and ship for our clients. We've already done work improving the development process and our pipelines for delivering code. All of these improvements enable us to provide a better product.
Grabbing some ice cream in Downtown Kitchener with our friends from Perimeter Development.What advice do you have for someone looking at BitBakery as a career option?
First—the people here are fantastic. The people here are great to work with and have diverse skill sets. In terms of the work, there's variety in the sense that you can touch many different areas or spaces. If you're on a team or at a company for multiple years, you may only be working on particular work where you don't necessarily get a broad range of exposure to different things or problems. At BitBakery, we're solving entirely different challenges across multiple industries. One day we're looking at HIPAA compliance. The next day we're working on Bluetooth Low Energy devices. The diversity of people and work make it a fantastic place.
Ready to learn more about working at BitBakery? Check out the career opportunities page or get in contact with us today.
