Zoran Đekić — engineering manager

First waypoint — Mira

Who’s in the suit

I started out building web forms and faking rounded corners with CSS hacks. Somewhere along the way I stopped reaching for the keyboard first and started reaching for the whiteboard, and found I liked that better.

These days I lead around twenty engineers across four teams. Most of the work is the unglamorous kind: making sure people know what’s expected of them, what they’re growing toward, and that the plan for this quarter is one we can actually keep, ensuring results for the stakeholders and growh for the team.

Second waypoint — Meridian

Flight rules

Teams own outcomes, not tickets Split a team by function and everyone is responsible for a slice while nobody is responsible for the result. I’d rather hand one team the whole problem.
Quality isn’t one team’s job The moment testing belongs to a single function it becomes a queue. It works better held in pieces, by everyone, from the first conversation to production.
Growth should be legible People deserve to see what the next step looks like before they’re asked to take it. Written expectations, regular feedback, no surprises at review time.
Plans you can keep A sprint that ends in half-finished work isn’t a plan, it’s a wish. Commit to less and land it.

Third waypoint — Halcyon

Ground covered

The first decade was building: enterprise .NET for banks and insurers, mobile back when that meant Cordova, and finally a health product where I was the entire team and the client’s only point of contact. That last one settled the question of where I was headed.

Most of it since looks similar from the outside — a company organised by function, and a slow, well-argued move toward teams that own a product end to end. A monolith taken apart into services. Manual testers turned into automation engineers. What each seniority level actually means, written down, so nobody has to guess what the next step costs.

The rest is people: one-to-ones that happen even in a bad week, and the honest conversation when someone isn’t where they need to be. On the good stretches almost nobody left, which is the only retention metric I trust. When production breaks I write the postmortem; when a new tool turns up, I use it myself before asking anyone else to.

Two things sit outside the line and I’d rather keep them in: six months as interim CTO of an e-learning company, putting a tablet with an entire primary-school curriculum on it into Zambian classrooms. And the ISO 9001 documentation nobody else volunteered for, which is how I ended up a certified auditor.

Zagreb University of Applied Sciences, mag. ing. techn. inf. · Umbraco Certified Expert · ISO 9001 auditor

Fourth waypoint — Vesper

Off the clock

Travels, world, cultures and rockets, mostly. The engineering, the missions, and the people in the back rooms who never left the ground — I’ll read about any of it.

The rest of the time I’m outside: long walks, longer hikes, and the kind of quiet that lets a week of meetings finally settle.

Last book read — Gene Kranz, Failure Is Not an Option

Last waypoint — Terminus

Elsewhere

Happy to talk about teams, rockets, or a good trail. Croatian or English — German if you’re patient.