Building the Team You'd Want to Be On – David Šabata (CTO at ROI Hunter)

Shapers & Builders

#7: Today I am speaking with David Šabata, who is CTO at ROI Hunter. ROI Hunter is providing SaaS tools for e-commerce companies. The company is mostly remote and has about 80 people, with 30 across product and engineering.

This conversation is part of a series about companies that use Shape Up, a delivery framework originally created at Basecamp. If you've never heard of Shape Up, check the show notes for a link to the video "Shaping in a nutshell" by Ryan Singer, former head of strategy at Basecamp and author of the book "Shape Up - Stop Running in Circles and Ship Work that Matters".

In our conversation, we talk about David's growth from individual contributor to engineering leader, and his north start principle of "building a setup that he'd want to step back into as an individual contributor at any moment". David shares how he carefully managed his team's transition to Shape Up by piloting it with a small team and generating early wins, how being strict on each project's allotted time has gotten the team to become true experts in "fixed time / variable scope", and the huge leverage he gets from enabling project teams to focus completely on their work.

Enjoy!

Links:
ROI Hunter: https://www.roihunter.com/
David on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidsabata/
Shaping in a nutshell: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h_8M23wVjXk
Shapers & Builders job board: https://www.shapers.builders