#Team_insightsBy Ahmed Atalla, Raseedi Co-founder.
The winning formula for the best person to work with is this triangle:
Our weekly highlights one of our oldest and most passionate team members. Ali Gamal, our Android Team Lead. Ali who has built Raseedi App from the very beginning over his 2 years tenure at Raseedi plays one of the most important roles in our team.
He’s the reason why we believe that a great hire is better than a hundred mediocre ones. He’s the reason why we believe it’s NOT the more the merrier when it comes to tech hires. Ali has single handedly built and managed our Android app from the ground up, from a simple dialer to a full rounded daily fintech app.
Let me walk you 3 stories that show how Ali fits the 3 sided triangle for an awesome team member perfectly.
Passion to the Product
When we launched our dialer, users had to open Raseedi app to make calls. Building the full rounded dialer that replaces the native was no easy task. We spent 4 months trying to build it but always faced hiccups with different manufacturer and handset types. But then Ali joins the team, he takes it as a challenge after we were losing faith to replace the mighty native dialer. In one month he developed the full dialer app that includes a built in directory, a built in Caller ID and a telecom optimizer for the cheapest cost. Now, Raseedi app opens even if the call is not initiated from our App. This grew the calls managed by our app to a whooping 4 million monthly calls every single month. Growing from only 100,000.
Passion to Raseedi App is what drives him, he’s the kind of person who sends slack messages at 2 am in the morning during the weekend for an issue one of the many friends he promoted Raseedi to faces. And Fixes it!
2. Passion to the profession
Every person who has dealt with techies will tell you about that eye glow when they’re challenged with a tech issue. (The good ones at least). It’s this excitement you see in their eyes to just get on the terminal and go through thousands of lines of code to spot the issue. Challenges we knew about and those we didn’t we’re what got his eyes glowing.
Here’s how we noticed it, we’d be looking at app numbers and suddenly some engagement metric spikes or the performance improves exceptionally. And when we ask if anyone has any idea. He casually answers “Yes, I was going through the app and did some enhancements”. Off sprint, Off time, just casually in his free time beyond his tasks he just improves the app performance. Or one day he comes up, I found some issues with a tool or SDK we’re using and proactively sends and helps our partner fix their own solutions. If anything this is what we call Passion to their profession.
3. Finally Loyalty and Team Player
Loyalty comes when you know you’re appreciated and hence never ask for recognition, credit or material benefit. Not once has he asked for recognition or credit. The only requests are the good ones, I want to know more and I want to do more. And when you have a knowledgeable person in their area, you fear their Ego would kick in at some point. We think Ego is not in his dictionary, if he knows he suggests and if he doesn’t he asks. He’s the kind of person who’d be interested to know more about Branding, Marketing, investments. You name it.
Let me summarize by telling you one short story that sums up all of the above traits, his passion for the product, loyalty and passion for what he does. A few weeks before our Rebrand launch, he reached out day in day out to our Brand Manager and even offered to bribe them for an early look at how the baby he’s built over the years will look like. This is what we call loyalty!
