Sharon Hinde
16 December 2024
My fourteen year adventure at The Adaptavist Group
In 2010, they told me that I'd fit right in—and fourteen years later, I'm looking back at a journey filled with great memories and fueled by a passion for user experience.
In early 2010, I was approached by a recruiter looking for someone with web development skills for a 'growing young company'. They said that, though small, the company was making an impact and was already well respected among its peers for being very passionate about their work. At the end of my first call with the recruiter, they told me I'd fit right in—naturally, I thought they probably said that to everyone! In my case, though, they turned out to be right. That small, passionate company hired me—and here we are 14 years later!
My first job title and role was Theme Developer, using my web development skills to customise and brand Confluence for Adaptavist customers using our ThemeBuilder plugin. At that point, everyone worked remotely—long before it was the norm!—and with only around 20 of us in the entire company, job roles were pretty different back then. Regardless of role, everyone pitched in on anything that needed doing. We had a rota for taking turns answering the phones and dealing with general enquiries, and through that experience, I was soon branching out into product support and development.
After three years, I noticed patterns in my interactions with our customers, and I mentioned to my colleagues that I thought our plugins could do with some front-end focus to improve the user experience. As it happened, I wasn't the only one thinking this. After some discussion, our enthusiasm paid off: the company had grown and was now able to form a dedicated product team to work on development, with a counterpart team focussing on customer support. I became a Front End Developer and set my sights on improving all the product elements that people interacted with.
2013 also saw some of the first Adaptavist-branded merch!
I saw first-hand the positive impact that user experience (UX) improvements had on our products during my time in that Front End Developer role. For the next few years, I worked my way through a variety of other roles working on our products, and I preached the ways and benefits of prioritising UX to anyone who would listen! By 2019, Adaptavist had not only heard me loud and clear but had also grown sufficiently for the creation of another new team. I was given the opportunity to continue my career development as the very first member of our dedicated UX team—and jumped at the chance.
Since then, I've been immensely proud to watch how the UX team has grown. A particular highlight was when the UX team headcount surpassed what had been the entire company's size when I joined in 2010! Particular thanks go to the expert leadership of Gunars Vucens, our current Head of UX, for both the growth of the team and my own development within it.
The UX team celebrating at the end of 2023—now too many to fit around one table!
From Senior Design Systems Engineer in 2021, and then promotion to Staff Engineer, that brings us to 2024. As a Staff Engineer, my job is to draw on those years of experience as a product engineer, together with my passion for great user experience, to align UX and engineering—sometimes with a little bit of 'cat herding'!—and keep everyone moving towards the same goal of customer-centred outcomes.
Adaptavist is not so small or young any more, now forming part of The Adaptavist Group (TAG) with a global headcount of over 1,000, but we've stayed true to exactly what that recruiter told me in 2010. We're a passionate company that hires—and, importantly, develops—passionate people, and for that, I hope we're now even more respected among our peers and our customers than we were back then.
I've made the decision to retire at the end of 2024 for personal reasons, but I'm so happy to have spent such a long stretch of my career here, being constantly encouraged, uplifted, and positively challenged by those around me. I'm leaving knowing that everything is in the hands of my incredibly capable teammates and that they're building the next chapter of TAG. I'll be cheering them on, and I look forward to seeing what they and TAG will have achieved in another fourteen years!