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At ParkBee, we are on a mission to optimise the use of parking spaces and give space back to the cities. Our product is used by thousands of users in the Netherlands and the UK, and we are ready to expand to the rest of Europe. While working towards this expansion, team PRIDE (which stands for ParkBee Research Innovation & Development Elite) is continuously pushing boundaries to optimise and extend our product. With our Friday Innovation days, we provide all engineers with the opportunity to be creative and try new things, creating a platform to grow! Getting new features, a better product and a happy team in return!

Today PRIDE consists of two specialist product teams with expertise in product, backend/frontend, UX, QA and data. On top of that we have a separate data scientist team to unearth the insight in our development. ParkBee is a unique experience compared to other projects. We enable our product team to have a close connection with our clients and stakeholders. Thousands of ParkBee users in the NL and UK continuously provide us with valuable feedback. This allows our team to stay committed to the product, validate their assumptions and improve. Many engineers join us for this reason, but more importantly, because of our unique mission to free the cities from parked vehicles. Our people love to contribute to a mission that impacts our society and therefore, choose to spend their days with ParkBee.

In PRIDE, we work in a Scrum environment, meaning that after every two-week sprint we evaluate thoroughly. How did it go? What went well and what didn’t? Our teams work closely together and have several combined sessions. This allows us to stay agile, adapt to market changes and quickly pinpoint impediments. One of our senior .NET developers explains; ‘’If something doesn’t go as planned, the team has the autonomy to make adjustments and move on’’.

Every week on Friday, our day looks completely different than usual. This is the day for engineers to step out of sprint work and start exploring. We can try out any new things we are interested in. We can choose to improve our tech skills, for example, learn new programming languages. We can also read more about an interesting topic, or experiment with a new tool or technology we wish to try. It’s an opportunity to develop, learn, and grow.

We allow developers to be flexible and every developer participates in a different way.  As one of our developers says: ‘’I start with reading the latest news in the industry to stay up to date and get inspiration for an idea. As soon as an idea pops up, we can start researching and gathering data in order to develop a concept and test its benefits for ParkBee’’. If the concept proves to be beneficial, our developers share it with others in the team. Once the idea is presented and everyone is on board, we add it to the backlog. This is how some of our products and best tech came to life. ‘’It’s a good thing that our developers are free to explore and do whatever they want. The beauty of this time is that we can decide what we prefer to do next’’.

For example; ‘Last Friday, I implemented POC, using GraphQL for communication between backend and frontend. This is a query language for APIs created by Facebook, which can give our frontends more power over how they get the data needed for the app. This is a powerful developer’s tool, which I see a lot of potential in for a microservice system like ours’. During Friday Innovation day, our developers are free to use any programming language. Some of our developers learn different languages to explore the horizon. Others use the languages they are most familiar with.

Can innovation be nurtured? ParkBee’s answer is yes! Allowing our engineers to innovate freely and develop creatively means we receive innovative products and features in return. These products and features are all fitting to the organisation’s demands, allowing ParkBee to remain in the stage of a fast growing scale-up. Some of our smaller projects led to important features, such as our new product GO that we are currently testing in a few of our locations. ‘’We moved to a new office and it had a tag access system. Our lead developer created an app for colleagues to get into the office with a single click of a button.’’ These examples show how the Friday Innovation day can lead to creative solutions.

The Friday Innovation days allow the team and ParkBee’s technology to develop. With thousands of users across two countries, ParkBee’s software is constantly evolving. 

ParkBee is looking for new talent. Do you want to be a part of our fast growing scale-up?