Five questions with Yannick Gloster, Software Engineer

As a Software Engineer at Tines, Yannick Gloster spends most of his day programming. From new AI features to quality-of-life updates, Yannick’s work gives him lots of creative freedom. Read on to learn more about Yannick, including his thoughts on company culture, his top tips for newcomers at Tines, and the projects he’s most proud of.

Can you tell us about yourself and what you like to do in your free time? 

I grew up sailing, I haven’t been doing it at a competitive level anymore, just casually whenever I can. It’s harder to do in Ireland - I grew up in California, but moved to Ireland to attend Trinity College Dublin. I’ve picked up rock climbing during college and I haven’t really stopped!

I’ve also recently gotten into Formula 1. I watch the races pretty regularly. I think it’s really engaging; there’s lots of action and technical engineering involved. It’s not just the individual driver’s performance - so much of it comes down to the team. You have to find that combination between a great driver and a great team, and ensure the car supports them both. 

It’s also a good excuse to hang out with friends. I graduated from Trinity a year and a half ago now, so I don’t get to see my friends as often as I used to. It’s nice to have a set time every other week to all hang out and watch the race.

What does a typical workday or week look like for you at Tines? 

I’m a software engineer, so I help build the product. As a team, we’re shipping multiple times a day. It’s really rewarding, because you can iterate, get feedback, catch issues, and ship fixes really quickly.

I recently switched engineering teams - for the last five months, I’ve been focused on making our AI features more flexible by supporting multiple AI providers. We broke down the problem into many smaller features that we’ve been shipping over the last couple of months so that we could get feedback from our customers.

Getting real-time feedback is the best way to ensure we’re making the product as good as it can possibly be.

We’re building the product that actually works for our customers, instead of the product we think will work for them.

Typically, companies have roadmaps detailing what the product will look like a few years down the line. We don’t actually have a roadmap, instead we work on one-month development cycles which has been a really nice structure to work in. Tines’ engineering culture encourages us to prioritize customer feedback and suggestions.

At the start of each month, as a team we identify the areas of work that we’d like to achieve during the upcoming cycle. These goals will be influenced by ideas from within teams, feedback that we’ve received from our customers, bugs in our backlog, and the priorities of our leadership team. Working this way has allowed us to break down problems into small, achievable projects that address our customer’s needs. Through this process, we also collaborate frequently between our Engineering, Design, and Product teams. 

We always make sure there’s a little bit of flexibility, too - we’re not trying to pack too many things into a month. We give ourselves breathing room to solve problems and tackle customer feedback as they come in.

If I see something come through from a customer that I could do in an afternoon or two, I can pause whatever I’m doing to focus on it.

What's the coolest thing you've worked on to date? 

I’ve worked on a lot of really cool things in my time with Tines. What I’m most proud of is the board view for Cases. We previously just had a list view -  it worked, and customers liked it. But one of the ways you interact with other case management tools like Jira is through a Kanban board that lets you drag and drop cases between states. This new board view makes it easier to organize your cases and prioritize tasks at a glance.

As I was starting to learn more about the product as a new engineer, I started to feel like it was something that was really missing. I had also seen a couple pieces of feedback from some of our Cases power users validating that it was a feature they were also asking for.  

When we got together in person as a team for our annual company kick-off in March, I pitched the idea to the team and we bounced ideas off each other about how we might build it. Later that evening, over a couple of drinks, a few of my colleagues said that I should just go spike out the idea and build a proof of concept! A couple of weeks later, Eoghan Reid, the designer working with the team (also an absolute legend), mocked up what boards might look like and it looked incredible. 

Later that month, I built a prototype and got some really positive feedback, not just from engineering and product, but also from other teams across the company.

And then I went and built it with a couple of others from the team, essentially from nothing but an idea! That was really fun.

Now, some customers interact with Tines only through the board view. That’s really rewarding, seeing so many of our customers interacting with something I helped drive the development of.

The AI features I’m working on now are equally as exciting - we have a lot of scope and opportunity for growth.

What advice would you give to someone just starting out at Tines? 

My main tip is to share your ideas with the team. Make sure the people around you know what you want to work on, what you’re passionate about, and the value it will bring to the company.

People across the company are super receptive. It wasn’t a surprise to the rest of the team that I wanted to work on our AI features or the Kanban board view. And because of that, we were able to factor those projects into the broader product plan every cycle.

Generally, just build stuff. The opportunity is there - there’s always things to improve, and we always get feedback from our customers.

It can seem overwhelming at times because there’s so much feedback. But we’re lucky that our customers are so engaged with the product, and I think engaging with that process helps you grow as an engineer and makes the product better overall.

What's your favorite thing about the Tines platform? Any tips? 

My favorite thing is the Tines library, which is a collection of pre-built workflows that are fun, educational, and productive.

If you’re a creative person, Tines is like a blank canvas. The possibilities with Tines are pretty much endless -  but that also can make it hard to find inspiration, or figure out how to get the most out of it. Sometimes, our customers don’t know what to do, or where to start.

The library gives me a good starting point when talking to customers and prospects. I’m able to show them how to connect to Slack, or how to automate their email spam detection processes.

At the end of the day, our goal is to make interacting with technology as easy as possible for our customers.

There are over 900 examples of workflows now, both from the Tines Labs team and the community. Our customers can submit their own workflows - it’s really rewarding to see people using the product as you’re working on it.

The library really reduces the friction you might feel when jumping into something new. And it also enables people to build their own things on top of that.

Anything else you’d like to add? 

I know everyone says it in these types of articles, but Tines is genuinely such a great place to work. I did internships at Microsoft and Stripe, which have thousands of employees.

The impact that one person can have at Tines, both internally and externally, is huge.

The culture here really emphasizes the communal vibe. ‘Soundness’ is one of our core values, and everyone here is sound, everyone is nice. I would genuinely hang out with my teammates outside of work, just like if I’d met them while sailing or rock climbing.

On the days that are harder because I have a difficult problem to solve, I know I’ll be supported well by my colleagues. If I have a question, I’m not afraid to ask.

As I’m also curious about other parts of the company, not just engineering, I’m able to easily chat with colleagues about marketing, sales, HR, or other departments. 

I’ve been able to explore, be creative, and try new things, which is so important to me as someone who’s starting their career. At a much larger company, you’re a smaller fish in the sea. Here at Tines, everyone knows everyone, which is a lot of fun and something I’ve really enjoyed.