Mladen Barjaktarević
Engineering
Creating new possibilities
I grew up in the municipality of New Belgrade, in one of the largest cities in the region. The municipality was built as a planned city on reclaimed land which used to be a swamp. This unusual set of residential blocks was heavily inspired by the Housing Unit design principle developed by the famous french architect Le Corbusier. The municipality strictly followed brutalist architectural style and philosophy. Despite this architecture style being heavily criticised, I believe that it represents the embodiment of the startup mindset. It is offering essentially a new approach based on a new technology for known challenges.Experience of building a shortwave radio for a local school competition inspired me to become an engineer. I was equally inspired by the rewarding results of making something useful and the opportunity to understand how the system I've just created actually operates. Unlike many others I was rarely satisfied by the fact that it just works. Quite contrary, every successful project inspired me to learn, experiment and understand about the system internals. This quest for learning what's under the hood continued and profoundly impacted the soon-to-follow humble software development episodes. While learning in those years unavoidable BASIC I wasn't satisfied just with the results. Instead, I had to understand how this code is actually executed. This urge to understand the technology and purpose of every single component in the system stayed with me ever since. It actually helped me a lot.
Thirty years forward, I'm again at the beginning of a new journey. I've spent my whole professional career building and creating software driven products. In all these years I've learned to follow the instinct both when designing but also when choosing the next challenges. Leaving a well established telecom company 8 years ago and joining the startup needed a lot of courage. The decision raised some eyebrows. I've followed my instinct and it proved to be the right decision. The product I've helped create there changed the market and customer perception. Such a decision as well as many other choices I've made wouldn't be possible without the unconditional support of my wife to whom I owe a lot. She has always been my huge supporter. We are blessed with a son, and I have to express a huge thanks to both of them.
Just before joining DevRev I discovered a new word - serendipity. It is after all not only about instinct. The reason for joining DevRev is not building yet another software product, but to actually help the software industry transform itself. After so many lines of code, meetings, designs, and projects postmortem analysis, I've concluded that there is something inherently inefficient in the established development processes. Creation of software products is in a way an art, not just an engineering. The artistic part in the process is predicting customer expectations but also predicting product journey and adding the prediction in product design. This is what makes some products great. What really matters to customers is the experience that starts with "unboxing". Maybe even more important is the product support years after the initial purchase. Maybe the most comical description of customers' expectations could be found in the movie "Sleeper", when a protagonist tries and successfully starts the engine of a 200 years old Beetle.
Today we are missing a tool for improving customer experience. Once again, I'm going to try to make a tool which will change the market and our perception of what's possible.