Julia: Your entrepreneurial goal is to offer yourselves as partners, to make your customers successful and to grow together. After one year of Whiskey Tango Foxtrot - how well have you been able to achieve these goals so far?
It has worked out very well - honestly maybe even better than expected. Together with our team, we have been able to win three major clients and have successfully supported them with their individual challenges. Everything was there: from the joint founding of companies and the design of IT strategies to the stabilization and scaling of extremely successful business models. We were able to contribute our expertise on a broad level and grew immensely due to the collaborative efforts put forth together with our clients.
Hauke: Your biggest challenge was to get back into backend development and infrastructure after many years of focusing on frontend development. Looking back on the year, how well did that work out and what were your highlights?
I now manage cloud accounts on AWS, Azure, GCP and Oracle. I discuss complex architectures with my colleagues and validate work results. So far, no one has noticed that I can't actually do that… or least couldn’t. I've been able to learn all of these things in a depth that has allowed us to make very good decisions together, with the dedicated help of my great colleagues. We've really evolved quickly together over the past year.
Luigi: A year ago, you said that at Whiskey Tango Foxtrot you were looking forward to finally being busy again with your heart and soul and focusing on clients and projects with your team. When you look back over the last few months, how well did that work and what are you most proud of?
Yes, it has worked really well! This is largely due to my colleagues, who have shown me every day that we made the right decision in founding and continuing to build Whiskey Tango Foxtrot. From day 1, I have witnessed such remarkable motivation that, even after 20 years of professional life, I am still deeply impressed. The intrinsic demand for quality is also very high. We are proving this right now with the market entry of Emilia Rechtsschutz in Switzerland. The client is very special for us, as we were able to support in multiple areas, including brand development, UX/UI design, marketing, and merchandising. As a team - together and collaborative with daily reviews and healthy feedback culture that makes us all stronger. That's not only a lot of fun, but also makes everyone involved really proud.
Julia: You missed the personal interaction and cooperation. At Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, you are a remote-first company. To what extent has your wish come true here, what are you doing for good team spirit and are you still convinced of decentralized work?
We still consider the concept of decentralized work to be the model of the future, where the advantages clearly outweigh the disadvantages. Just the opportunity to meet and work with exciting people outside of the usual commuting radius makes it extremely exciting for us as a growing tech company. At the same time, many of us - myself included - also need regular face-to-face interaction. To overcome this contradiction, we organize major team events every 8 to 12 weeks, among other things, at which we try to bring together as many colleagues as possible. We always come up with something special and try to cover as wide a spectrum of interests as possible with our events. So far this has worked well, with a lot of positive feedback from my colleagues.
Hauke: You talked about always wanting to face new technological challenges with an open mind. How well have you been able to do that so far, and how has Whiskey Tango Foxtrot evolved technologically over the past year?
Since many of our staff have worked with similar technologies for many years, I was very concerned about how we would create a culture where our colleagues leave well-worn paths without stumbling. With our new projects, we've sometimes left those well-worn paths for small excursions, but we've also boldly gone down completely new paths and lost no one in the process. This year, we created a completely new cloud infrastructure in TypeScript/Pulumi adapted to our needs, used PaaS for less complex apps, implemented new frontend frameworks and content management systems and are now using a serverless architecture for our latest project.
Julia, Hauke, Luigi. Congratulations on a successful year at Whiskey Tango Foxtrot. What are your wishes and goals for the coming year?
We want to continue to grow - with the right clients, projects, and colleagues at our side. We hope that we can continue to question our work and ourselves, to be creative in the face of challenges, and to drive our further development together as a team - all while having fun. Hopefully, success with our clients and projects continue, as well as the associated financial rewards.
